
Class„L3 loSl 



BY WILLIAM JAMES 

The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 8vo. $5.00, net. 
New York : Henry Holt & Co. 1890. 

Psychology: Briefer Course. i2mo. $1.60, Edcl. net. New 
York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892. 

The Varieties of Religious Experience. $3.20, net. New 
York : Longmans, Green & Co. 1902. 

The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philoso- 
phy. i2mo. $2.00. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 

1897. 

Is Life Worth Living? i8mo. 50 cents, net. Philadelphia : 
S. B. Weston, 1305 Arch Street. 1896. 

Hainan Immortality : Two supposed Objections to the 
Doctrine. i6mo. $1,00. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co. 1898. 

Talks to Teachers on Psychology : and to Students on Some 
of Life's Ideals. i2mo. $1.50, Edcl. net. New York ; 
Henry Holt & Co. 1899. 

Pragmatism. $1.25, net. New York : Longmans, Green & 
Co. 1907. 

The Meaning of Truth : A Sequel to Pragmatism. $1.25, net. 
New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 1909. 

A Pluralistic Universe. $1.50, net. New York : Longmans, 
Green & Co. 1909. 



The Literary Remains of Henry James. Edited, with an in- 
troduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown 
8vo. $2.00. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. 



TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO 
STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S 
IDEALS. By WILLIAM JAMES 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1914 






COPYRIGHT, 1899, I900 
BY 
WILLIAM JAMBS 



/s 



1. ELUS CO., PRINTERS, 272 CONOR8SS ST., B08TOH. 



PREFACE. 



In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation 
to give a few public lectures on psychology to the 
Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the 
substance of that course, which has since then been 
delivered at various places to various teacher-audi- 
ences. I have found by experience that what my 
hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, 
and what they most care for is concrete practical 
application. So I have gradually weeded out the 
former, and left the latter unreduced ; and now, that 
I have at last written out the lectures, they contain 
a minimum of what is deemed < scientific ' in psy- 
chology, and are practical and popular in the ex- 
treme. 

Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their 
heads at this ; but in taking my cue from what has 
seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences I be- 
lieve that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the 
more genuine public need. 

Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, 
subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and num- 
bered headings, the variations of type, and all the 



iv PREFACE 

other mechanical artifices on which they are accus- 
tomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has 
been to make them conceive, and, if possible, re- 
produce sympathetically in their imagination, the 
mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity 
which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop 
himself into distinct processes and compartments; 
and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of 
my book to make it look, when printed, like a Bae- 
deker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithme- 
tic. So far as books printed like this book force the 
fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's atten- 
tion, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect 
a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied 
a craving (not altogether without its legitimate 
grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and 
subdivisions. 

Eeaders acquainted with my larger books on Psy- 
chology will meet much familiar phraseology. In the 
chapters on habit and memory I have even copied 
several pages verbatim, but I do not know that 
apology is needed for such plagiarism as this. 

The talks to students, which conclude the volume, 
were written in response to invitations to deliver 
' addresses' to students at women's colleges. The 
first one was to the graduating class of the Boston 
Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it contin- 



PBEFACE V 

ties the series of talks to teachers. The second and 
the third address belong together, and continue an- 
other line of thought. 

I wish I were able to make the second, ' On a Cer- 
tain Blindness in Human Beings/ more impressive. 
It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism 
which it may seem to some readers. It connects 
itself with a definite view of the world and of our 
moral relations to the same. Those who have done 
me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic 
essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or 
individualistic philosophy. According to that philos- 
ophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, 
even though that mind be dubbed l the Absolute/ to 
know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life 
need many cognizers to take them in. There is no 
point of view absolutely public and universal. Pri- 
vate and uncommunicable perceptions always remain 
over, and the worst of it is that those who look for 
them from the outside never know where. 

The practical consequence of such a philosophy is 
the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness 
of individuality, — is, at any rate, the outward toler- 
ance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These 
phrases are so familiar that they sound now rathei 
dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner 
meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may 



Y! PREFACE 

easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation t@ 
inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et 
armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance 
as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. 
Beligiously and philosophically, our ancient national 
doctrine of live and let live may prove to have 
a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to 
imagine it to possess. 

Cambridge, Mass., March, 1899. 



CONTENTS. 



TALKS TO TEACHERS. 

PAGE 

I. Psychology and the Teaching Art . . 3 

The American educational organization, 3 — 
What teachers may expect from psychology, 5 — 
Teaching' methods must agree with psychology, 
but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom, 7 — 
The science of teaching and the science of war, 
9 — The educational uses of psychology defined, 
10 — The teacher's duty toward child-study, 12. 

II. The Stream of Consciousness .... 15 

Our mental life is a succession of conscious 
'fields,' 15 — They have a focus and a margin, 
18 — This description contrasted with the theory 
of 'ideas,' 20 — Wundt's conclusions, 20, note. 

m. The Child as a Behaving Organism . 22 

Mind as pure reason and mind as practical 
guide, 22 — The latter view the more fashionable 
one to-day, 23 — It will be adopted in this work, 
24 — Why so? 25 — The teacher's function is to 
train pupils to behavior, 28. 

TV. Education and Behavior 2§ 

Education defined, 29 — Conduct is always its 
outcome, 30 — Different national ideals: Germany 
and England, 31. 



Viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

V. The Necessity op Reactions .... 33 

No impression without expression, 33 — Verbal 
reproduction, 34 — Manual training, 35 — Pupils 
should know their 'marks,' 37. 



VI. Native and Acquired Reactions . . . . 38 

The acquired reactions must be preceded by 
native ones, 38 — Illustration: teaching* child to 
ask instead of snatching', 39 — Man has more in- 
stincts than other mammals, 43. 



VTI. What the Native Reactions are . . 45 

Fear and love, 45 — Curiosity, 45 — Imitation, 
48 — Emulation, 49 — Forbidden by Rousseau, 51 

— His error, 52 — Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. 
Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse, 54 — 
Ownership, 55 — Its educational uses, 56 — Con- 
structiveness, 58 — Manual teaching, 59 — Transi- 
toriness in instincts, 60 — Their order f of succes- 
sion, 61. 

VTEL The Laws of Habit 64 

Good and bad habits, 64 — Habit due to plasti- 
city of organic tissues, 65 — The aim of education 
is to make useful habits automatic, 66 — Maxims 
relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative, 67 

— 2. No exception, 68 — 3. Seize first opportunity 
to act, 69 — 4. Don't preach, 71 — Darwin and 
poetry: without exercise our capacities decay, 71 

— The habit of mental and muscular relaxation, 
74 — Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort 
trained, 75 — Sudden conversions compatible with 
laws of habit, 76 — Momentous influence of habits 
on character, 77. 



CONTENTS IX 

PAGE 

IX. The Association of Ideas 79 

.A case of habit, 79 — The two laws, contiguity 
and similarity, 80 — The teacher has to build up 
useful systems of association, 83 — Habitual asso- 
ciations determine character, 84 — Indeterminate- 
ness of our trains of association, 85 — We can 
trace them backward, but not foretell them, 86 — 
Interest deflects, 87 — Prepotent parts of the field, 
88 — In teaching, multiply cues, 89. 

X. Interest 91 

The child's native interests, 91 — How uninterest- 
ing things acquire an interest, 94 — Rules for the 
teacher, 95 — ' Preparation ' of the mind for the 
lesson: the pupil must have something to attend 
with, 97 — All later interests are borrowed from 
original ones, 99. 

XL Attention 100 

Interest and attention are two aspects of one 
fact, 100 — Voluntary attention comes in beats, 
101 — Genius and attention, 102 — The subject 
must change to win attention, 103 — Mechanical 
aids, 104 — The physiological process, 106 — The 
new in the old is what excites interest, 108 — In- 
terest and effort are compatible, 110 — Mind-wan- 
dering, 112 — Not fatal to mental efficiency, 114. 

XII. Memory 116 

Due to association, 116 — No recall without a 
cue, 118 — Memory is due to brain-plasticity, 119 
— Native retentiveness, 120 — Number of associa- 
tions may practically be its equivalent, 122 — Re- 
tentiveness is a fixed property of the individual, 
123 — Memory versus memories, 124 — Scientific 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

system as help to memory, 126 — Technical mem- 
ories, 127 — Crainming, 129 — Elementary memory 
nnimprovable, 130 — Utility of verbal memorizing, 
131 — Measurements of immediate memory, 133 — 
They throw little light, 134 — Passion is the im- 
portant factor in human efficiency, 137 — Eye- 
memory, ear-memory, etc., 137 — The rate of 
forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results, 139 — Influence 
of the unreproducible, 142 — To remember, one 
must think and connect, 143. 

XIII.' The Acquisition of Ideas 144 

Education gives a stock of conceptions, 144 — 
The order of their acquisition, 146 — Value of 
verbal material, 149 — Abstractions of different 
orders : when are they assimilable, 151 — False 
conceptions of children, 152. 

XIV. Apperception 155 

Often a mystifying idea, 155 — The process de- 
fined, 157 — The law of economy, 159 — Old- 
fogyism, 160 — How many types of apperception? 
161 — New heads of classification must continually 
be invented, 163 — Alteration of the apperceiving 
mass, 165 — Class names are what we work by, 
166 — Few new fundamental conceptions acquired 
after twenty-five, 167. 

XV. The Will . 169 

The word defined, 169 — All consciousness tends 
to action, 170 — Ideo-motor action, 171 — Inhibi- 
tion, 172 — The process of deliberation, 174 — 
Why so few of our ideas result in acts, 176 — 
The associationist account of the will, 177 — A 
balance of impulses and inhibitions^ 178 — The 



CONTENTS XI 

PAGE 

over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type, 179 
— The perfect type, 180— The balky will, 181 — 
What character building consists in, 184 — Right 
action depends on right apperception of the case, 
185 — Effort of will is effort of attention: the 
drunkard's dilemma, 18*7 — Vital importance of 
voluntary attention, 189 — Its amount may be in- 
determinate, 191 — Affirmation of free-will, 192 — 
Two typs of inhibition, 193 — Spinoza on inhibi- 
tion by a higher good, 194 — Conclusion, 195. 



TALKS TO STUDENTS. 

L 
THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 199 

n. 

ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS 229 

m. 

WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT ? . . , 265 



TALKS TO TEACHERS 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART 

In the general activity and uprising of ideal in- 
terests which every one with an eye for fact can 
discern all about us in American life, there is per- 
haps no more promising feature than the fermen- 
tation which for a dozen years or more has been 
going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere 
of education their functions may lie, there is to 
be seen among them a really inspiring amount of 
searching of the heart about the highest concerns 
of their profession. The renovation of nations 
begins always at the top, among the reflective 
members of the State, and spreads slowly outward 
and downward. The teachers of this country, 
one may say, have its future in their hands. The 
earnestness which they at present show in striving 
to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index 
of the nation's probabilities of advance in all idea! 
directions. The outward organisation of educa 
tion which we have in our United States is per 



4 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

haps, on the whole, the best organization that 
exists in any country. The State school systems 
give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for 
experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere 
else to be found on such an important scale. The 
independence of so many of the colleges and uni- 
versities; the give and take of students and in- 
structors between them all; their emulation, and 
their happy organic relations to the lower schools ; 
the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from 
the older American recitation-method (and so 
avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-sys- 
tem prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which 
considers too little the individual student, and yet 
not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the 
individual student, which the English tutorial sys- 
tem would seem too often to entail), — all these 
things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the 
sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily 
believe), all these things, I say, are most happy 
features of our scholastic life, and from them the 
most sanguine auguries may be drawn. 

Having so favorable an organization, all we 
need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get 
superior men and women working more and more 
abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART 5 

generation or two America may well lead the 
education of the world. I must say that I look 
forward with no little confidence to the day when 
that shall be an accomplished fact. 

No one has profited more by the fermentation 
of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we 
psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers 
for a completer professional training, and their 
aspiration toward the < professional ' spirit in their 
work, have led them more and more to turn to us 
for light on fundamental principles. And in these 
few hours which we are to spend together you 
look to me, I am sure, for information concerning 
the mind's operations, which may enable you to 
labor more easily and effectively in the several 
schoolrooms over which you preside. 

Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all 
title to such hopes. Psychology ought certainly 
to give the teacher radical help. And yet I con- 
fess that, acquainted as I am with the height of 
some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious 
lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not 
a few of you may experience some disappointment 
at the net results. In other words, I am not sure 
that you may not be indulging fancies that are 
just a shade exaggerated. That would not be 



6 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

altogether astonishing, for we have been having 
something like a 4 boom' in psychology in this 
country. Laboratories and professorships have 
been founded, and reviews established. The air 
has been full of rumors. The editors of educa- 
tional journals and the arrangers of conventions 
have had to show themselves enterprising and on a 
level with the novelties of the day. Some of the 
professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, 
and I am not sure even that the publishers have 
been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has 
thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas 
withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive 
and aspiring as many of you are, have been 
plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our 
science, which to a great extent has been more 
mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does 
seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystifi- 
cation laid upon the teachers of our day. The mat- 
ter of their profession, compact enough in itself, 
has to be frothed up for them in journals and insti- 
tutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in 
a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples 
are not independent and critical-minded enough 
(and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier 
grades have any defect — the slightest touch of a 



THE «NEW'' PSYCHOLOGY f 

defect in the world — it is that you are a mite too 
docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and 
balance and measure in those who get a license to 
lay down the law to them from above. 

As regards this subject of psychology, now, I 
wish at the very threshold to do what I can to dis- 
pel the mystification. So I say at once that in 
my humble opinion there is no « new psychology ' 
worthy of the name. There is nothing but the 
old psychology which began in Locke's time, plus 
a little physiology of the brain and senses and 
theory of evolution, and a few refinements of intro- 
spective detail, for the most part without adapta- 
tion to the teacher's use. It is only the funda- 
mental conceptions of psychology which are of 
real value to the teacher ; and they, apart from the 
aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from 
being new. — I trust that you will see better what 
I mean by this at the end of all these talks. 

I say moreover that you make a great, a very 
great mistake, if you think that psychology, being 
the science of the mind's laws, is something from 
which you can deduce definite programmes and 
schemes and methods of instruction for immediate 
schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and 
teaching is an art; and sciences never generate 



$ TALKS TO TEACHERS 

arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary 
inventive mind must make the application, by 
using its originality. 

The science of logic never made a man reason 
rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such 
a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The 
most such sciences can do is to help us to catch 
ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to 
reason or to behave wrongly ; and to criticise our- 
selves more articulately after we have made mis- 
takes. A science only lays down lines within 
which the rules of the art must fall, laws which 
the follower of the art must not transgress ; but 
what particular thing he shall positively do within 
those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. 
One genius will do his work well and succeed in 
one way, while another succeeds as well quite dif- 
ferently ; yet neither will transgress the lines. 

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, 
out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete ob- 
servation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) 
the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, 
the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by 
side, and the former was not derived in any sense 
from the latter. The two were congruent, but 
neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the 



SCIENCES AND ARTS 9 

teaching must agree with the psychology, but need 
not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that 
would so agree; for many diverse methods of 
teaching may equally well agree with psychologi- 
cal laws. 

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no 
guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To ad- 
vance to that result, we must have an additional 
endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity 
to tell us what definite things to say and do when 
the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting 
and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete 
situation, though they are the alpha and omega of 
the teacher's art, are things to which psychology 
cannot help us in the least. 

The science of psychology, and whatever science 
of general pedagogics may be based on it, are in 
fact much like the science of war. Nothing is 
simpler or more definite than the principles of 
either. In war, all you have to do is to work your 
enemy into a position from which the natural ob- 
stacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to ; 
then to fall on him in numbers superior to his 
own, at a moment when you have led him to think 
you far away ; and so, with a minimum of expos- 
ure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, 



10 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in 
teaching, you must simply work your pupil into 
such a state of interest in what you are going to 
teach him that every other object of attention is 
banished from his mind ; then reveal it to him so 
impressively that he will remember the occasion 
to his dying day ; and finally fill him with devour- 
ing curiosity to know what the next steps in con- 
nection with the subject are. The principles being 
so plain, there would be nothing but victories for 
the masters of the science, either on the battlefield 
or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to 
make their application to an incalculable quantity 
in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The 
mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working 
away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the 
mind of the commander on the other side from the 
scientific general. Just what the respective ene- 
mies want and think, and what they know and do 
not know, are as hard things for the teacher as 
for the general to find out. Divination and per- 
ception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic 
strategy, are the only helpers here. 

But, if the use of psychological principles thus 
be negative rather than positive, it does not follow 
that it may not be a great use, all the same. It 



HOW PSYCHOLOGY SHEDS LIGHT II 

certainly narrows the path for experiments and 
trials. We know in advance, if we are psycholo- 
gists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our 
psychology saves ns from mistakes. It makes us, 
moreover, more clear as to what we are about. 
We gain confidence in respect to any method 
which we are using as soon as we believe that 
it has theory as well as practice at its back. 
Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and 
it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at 
two different angles, — to get a stereoscopic view, 
so to speak, of the youthful organism who is our 
enemy, and, while handling him with all our con- 
crete tact and divination, to be able, at the same 
time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner 
elements of his mental machine. Such a complete 
knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive 
and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which 
every teacher ought to aim. 

Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of 
the mental machine can be clearly apprehended, 
and their workings easily grasped. And, as the 
most general elements and workings are just those 
parts of psychology which the teacher finds most 
directly useful, it follows that the amount of this 
science which is necessary to all teachers need not 



12 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

be very great. Those who find themselves loving 
the subject may go as far as they please, and be- 
come possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, 
even though in some of them one might appre- 
hend a little loss of balance from the tendency 
observable in all of us to overemphasize certain 
special parts of a subject when we are studying 
it intensely and abstractly. But for the great 
majority of you a general view is enough, pro- 
vided it be a true one ; and such a general view, 
one may say, might almost be written on the palm 
of one's hand. 

Least of all need you, merely as teachers, deem 
it part of your duty to become contributors to 
psychological science or to make psychological 
observations in a methodical or responsible man- 
ner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child- 
study have thrown a certain burden on you in this 
way. By all means let child-study go on, — it is 
refreshing all our sense of the child's life. There 
are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in 
filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compil- 
ing statistics, and computing the per cent. Child- 
study will certainly enrich their lives. And, if its 
results, as treated statistically, would seem on the 
whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes 



CHILD-STUDY 13 

and observations of which it in part consist do 
certainly acquaint us more intimately with our 
pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to 
discern in the child before us processes similiar to 
those we have read of as noted in the children, — 
processes of which we might otherwise have re- 
mained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let 
the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if 
they so prefer, and feel free not to contribute to 
the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it 
be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by 
regulation on those to whom it proves an exter- 
minating bore, or who in any way whatever miss 
in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I 
cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, 
Professor Miinsterberg, when he says that the 
teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete 
and ethical, is positively opposed to the psycho- 
logical observer's, which is abstract and analytic. 
Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes 
successfully, in most of us they must conflict. 

The worst thing that can happen to a good 
teacher is to get a bad conscience about her pro- 
fession because she feels herself hopeless as a psy- 
chologist. Our teachers are overworked already. 
Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary 



14 TALKS TO TEACHEB8 

weight to their burden is a foe of education. A 
bad conscience increases the weight of every other 
burden; yet I know that child-study, and other 
pieces of psychology as well, have been productive 
of bad conscience in many a really innocent ped- 
agogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this 
passing word from me might tend to dispel such 
a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it 
is certainly one of those fruits of more or less 
systematic mystification of which I have already 
complained. The best teacher may be the poorest 
contributor of child-study material, and the best 
contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact 
is more palpable than this. 

So much for what seems the most reasonable 
general attitude of the teacher toward the subject 
which is to occupy our attention* 



n. 

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

I SAID a few minutes ago that the most general 
elements and workings of the mind are all that 
the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with 
for his purposes. 

Now the immediate fact which psychology, the 
science of mind, has to study is also the most 
general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, 
when awake (and often when asleep), some kind 
of consciousness is always going on. There is a 
stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields 
(or of whatever you please to call them), of 
knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, 
etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that con- 
stitute our inner life. The existence of this stream 
is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form 
the essential problem, of our science. So far as 
we class the states or fields of consciousness, write 
down their several natures, analyze their contents 
into elements, or trace their habits of succession, 



16 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

we are on the descriptive or analytic level. So 
far as we ask where they come from or why they 
are just what they are, we are on the explanatory 
leveL 

In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect 
the questions that come up on the explanatory 
level. It must be frankly confessed that in no 
fundamental sense do we know where our succes- 
sive fields of consciousness come from, or why 
they have the precise inner constitution which 
they do have. They certainly follow or accom- 
pany our brain states, and of course their special 
forms are determined by our past experiences and 
education. But, if we ask just how the brain con- 
ditions them, we have not the remotest inkling of 
an answer to give ; and, if we ask just how the 
education moulds the brain, we can speak but in 
the most abstract, general, and conjectural terms. 
On the other hand, if we should say that they are 
due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which 
reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms 
of spiritual energy, our words would be familiar 
enough, it is true ; but I think you will agree that 
they would offer little genuine explanatory mean- 
ing. The truth is that we really do not know the 
answers to the problems on the explanatory level, 



OUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 

even though in some directions of inquiry there 
may be promising speculations to be found. For 
our present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them 
entirely, and turn to mere description. This state 
of things was what I had in mind when, a moment 
ago, I said there was no « new psychology ' worthy 
of the name. 

We have thus fields of consciousness, — that is the 
first general fact ; and the second general fact is 
that the concrete fields are always complex. They 
contain sensations of our bodies and of the ob- 
jects around us, memories of past experiences and 
thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction 
and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other 
emotional conditions, together with determinations 
of the will, in every variety of permutation and 
combination. 

In most of our concrete states of consciousness 
all these different classes of ingredients are found 
simultaneously present to some degree, though the 
relative proportion they bear to one another is 
very shifting. One state will seem to be com- 
posed of hardly anything but sensations, another 
of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around 
the sensation, if one consider carefully, there will 
always be some fringe of thought or will, and 



18 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

around the memory some margin or penumbra of 
emotion or sensation. 

In most of our fields of consciousness there is a 
core of sensation that is very pronounced. You, 
for example, now, although you are also thinking 
and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensa- 
tions of my face and figure, and through your ears 
sensations of my voice. The sensations are the 
centre or focus, the thoughts and feelings the mar- 
gin, of your actually present conscious field. 

On the other hand, some object of thought, 
some distant image, may have become the focus 
of your mental attention even while I am speak- 
ing, — your mind, in short, may have wandered 
from the lecture ; and, in that case, the sensations 
of my face and voice, although not absolutely 
vanishing from your conscious field, may have 
taken up there a very faint and marginal place. 

Again, to take another sort of variation, some 
feeling connected with your own body may have 
passed from a marginal to a focal place, even 
while I speak. 

The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal 
object,' which we owe to Mr. Lloyd Morgan, re- 
quire, I think, no further explanation. The dis- 
tinction they embody is a very important one, and 



THE FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 

they are the first technical terms which I shall ask 
you to remember. 

In the successive mutations of our fields of con- 
sciousness, the process by which one dissolves into 
another is often very gradual, and all sorts of 
inner rearrangements of contents occur. Some- 
times the focus remains but little changed, while 
the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus 
alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus 
and margin change places. Sometimes, again, 
abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. 
There can seldom be a sharp description. All 
we know is that, for the most part, each field has 
a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that 
from this practical point of view we can class a 
field with other fields similar to it, by calling it 
a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of 
abstract thought, of volition, and the like. 

Vague and hazy as such an account of our 
stream of consciousness may be, it is at least se- 
cure from positive error and free from admixture 
of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school 
of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of out- 
line, has tried to make things appear more exact 
and scientific by making the analysis more sharp. 



20 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

The various fields of consciousness, according to 
this school, result from a definite number of per- 
fectly definite elementary mental states, mechani- 
cally associated into a mosaic or chemically com- 
bined. According to some thinkers, — Spencer, 
for example, or Taine, — these resolve themselves 
at last into little elementary psychic particles or 
atoms of 'mind-stuff,' out of which all the more 
immediately known mental states are said to be 
built up. Locke introduced this theory in a 
somewhat vague form. Simple ' ideas ' of sensa- 
tion and reflection, as he called them, were for 
him the bricks of which our mental architecture 
is built up. If I ever have to refer to this theory 
again, I shall refer to it as the theory of « ideas.' 
But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether. 
Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only 
conjectural; and, for your practical purposes as 
teachers, the more unpretending conception of the 
stream of consciousness, with its total waves or 
fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.* 



*In the light of some of the expectations that are abroad concern- 
ing the ' new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually can- 
did confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of labora- 
tory-experience : 

" The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists 
essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as I believe : 



PROFESSOR WUNDT'3 VIEWS 21 

in making this really possible, in any exact sense. Well, has our 
experimental self -observation, so understood, already accomplished 
aught of importance? No general answer to this question can be 
given, because in the unfinished state of our science, there is, even 
inside of the experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted 
body of psychologic doctrine. . . . 

" In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time 
of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can 
only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank the 
newer methods. And if I were asked in what for me the worth of ex- 
perimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still consists, 
I should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of the nature 
and connection of our inner processes. I learned in the achievements 
of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental synthe- 
sis. .. . From my inquiry into time-relations, etc., ... I attained an 
insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually sepa- 
rated by artificial abstractions and names, such as ideation, feeling, 
will; and I saw the indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its 
phases, of the mental life. The chronometric study of association- 
processes finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental ' images ' 
[reproducirten Vorstellungeri] was one of those numerous self-decep- 
tions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forth- 
with thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I 
learned to understand an ' idea ' as a process no less melting and fleet- 
ing than an act of feeling or of will, and I comprehended the older 
doctrine of association of ' ideas' to be no longer tenable. . . . Besides 
all this, experimental observation yielded much other information 
about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the 
exact numerical value of certain psycho-physical data, and the like. 
But I hold all these more special results to be relatively insignificant 
by-products, and by no means the important thing." — Philosophische 
Studien, x. 121-124. The whole passage should be read. As I interpret 
it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the 
stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, 
still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up 'the 
mind ' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these 
off, and labelling them by technical names. 



III. 

THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM 

I wish now to continue the description of the 
peculiarities of the stream of consciousness by 
asking whether we can in any intelligible way 
assign its functions. 

It has two functions that are obvious : it leads 
to knowledge, and it leads to action. 

Can we say which of these functions is the 
more essential? 

An old historic divergence of opinion comes in 
here. Popular belief has always tended to esti- 
mate the worth of a man's mental processes by 
their effects upon his practical life. But philo- 
sophers have usually cherished a different view. 
" Man's supreme glory," they have said, " is to be 
a rational being, to know absolute and eternal and 
universal truth. The uses of his intellect for 
practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 
* The theoretic life ' is his soul's genuine concern." 
Nothing can be more different in its results for 
our personal attitude than to take sides with one 



THE TWO VIEWS OF OUR MIND 23 

or the other of these views, and emphasize the 
practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter 
case, abstraction from the emotions and passions 
and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs 
would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy ; 
and all that makes for quiet and contemplation 
should be regarded as conducive to the highest 
human perfection. In the former, the man of con- 
templation would be treated as only half a human 
being, passion and practical resource would be- 
come once more glories of our race, a concrete 
victory over this earth's outward powers of dark- 
ness would appear an equivalent for any amount 
of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would 
remain as the test of every education worthy of 
the name. 

It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the 
psychology of our own day the emphasis is trans- 
ferred from the mind's purely rational function, 
where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call 
the whole classic tradition in philosophy had 
placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. 
The tfieory of evolution is mainly responsible for 
this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has 
been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom 
pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose 



24 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

mind, so far as it can have had any function, 
would appear to have been an organ for adapting 
their movements to the impressions received from 
the environment, so as to escape the better from 
destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in 
the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super- 
added biological perfection, — useless unless it 
prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable 
apart from that consideration. 

Deep in our own nature the biological founda- 
tions of our consciousness persist, undisguised and 
undiminished. Our sensations are here to attract 
us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encour- 
age us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to 
restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we 
may prosper and our days be long in the land. 
Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight 
or of practically inapplicable sesthetic perception 
or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors 
might at this rate be regarded as only part of the 
incidental excess of function that necessarily ac- 
companies the working of every complex machine. 

I shall ask you now — not meaning at all 
thereby to close the theoretic question, but merely 
because it seems to me the point of view likely to 
be of greatest practical use to you as teachers — 



THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW 25 

to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the 
biological conception, as thus expressed, and to 
l a y your own emphasis on the fact that man, 
whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical 
being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting 
him to this world's life. 

In the learning of all matters, we have to start 
with some one deep aspect of the question, ab- 
stracting it as if it were the only aspect ; and then 
we gradually correct ourselves by adding those 
neglected other features which complete the case. 
No one believes more strongly than I do that 
what our senses know as i this world ' is only one 
portion of our mind's total environment and ob- 
ject. Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is 
the sine qua non of all the rest. If you grasp the 
facts about it firmly, you may proceed to higher 
regions undisturbed. As our time must be so 
short together, I prefer being elementary and 
fundamental to being complete, so I propose to 
you to hold fast to the ultra-simple point of 
view. 

The reasons why I call it so fundamental can 
be easily told. 

First, human and animal psychology thereby 
become less discontinuous. I know that to some 



26 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason, 
but there are others whom it will affect. 

Second, mental action is conditioned by brain 
action, and runs parallel therewith. But the 
brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for 
practical behavior. Every current that runs into 
it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into 
muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the 
animal to the environment from which the current 
came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our 
view to treat the brain life and the mental life as 
having one fundamental kind of purpose. 

Third, those very functions of the mind that do 
not refer directly to this world's environment, the 
ethical Utopias, aesthetic visions, insights into 
eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, 
could never be carried on at all by a human indi- 
vidual, unless the mind that produced them in 
him were also able to produce more practically 
useful products. The latter are thus the more 
essential, or at least the more primordial results. 

Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities 
are themselves far more connected with our be- 
havior and our adaptation to the environment than 
at first sight might appear. No truth, however 
abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably 



ALL CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO ACTION 27 

at some time influence our earthly action. You 
must remember that, when I talk of action here, 
I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, 
I mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and ten- 
dencies 'from' tilings and tendencies 'toward' 
things, and emotional determinations ; and I mean 
them in the future as well as in the immediate 
present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might 
seem as if no action followed. You might call it 
a purely theoretic process, with no practical 
result. But it must have a practical result. It 
cannot take place at all and leave your conduct 
unaffected. If not to-day, then on some far future 
day, you will answer some question differently by 
reason of what you are thinking now. Some of 
you will be led by my words into new veins of 
inquiry, into reading special books. These will 
develop your opinion, whether for or against. 
That opinion will in turn be expressed, will re- 
ceive criticism from others in your environment, 
and will affect your standing in their eyes. We 
cannot escape our destiny, which is practical ; and 
even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its 
working out. 



28 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way 
for you to acquiescence in my proposal. As 
teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient 
conception for you to adopt of the youthful psy- 
chological phenomena handed over to your inspec- 
tion if you consider them from the point of view 
of their relation to the future conduct of their 
possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a first con- 
ception and as a main conception. You should 
regard your professional task as if it consisted 
chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to be- 
havior ; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense 
of his manners, but in the very widest possible 
sense, as including every possible sort of fit re- 
action on the circumstances into which he may 
find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life. 

The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative 
reaction. Not to speak, not to move, is one of the 
most important of our duties, in certain practical 
emergencies. "Thou shalt refrain, renounce, ab- 
stain ! " This often requires a great effort of will 
power, and, physiologically considered, is just as 
positive a nerve function as is motor discharge. 



IV. 

EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR 

In our foregoing talk we were led to frame 
a very simple conception of what an education 
means. In the last analysis it consists in the 
organizing of resources in the human being, of 
powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social 
and physical world. An 'uneducated' person is 
one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual 
situations. On the contrary, one who is educated 
is able practically to extricate himself, by means 
of the examples with which his memory is stored 
and of the abstract conceptions which he has 
acquired, from circumstances in which he never 
was placed before. Education, in short, cannot 
be better described than by calling it the organiza- 
tion of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies 
to behavior. 

To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us 
educated, in our several ways ; and we show our 
education at this present moment by different 
conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, 



80 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

with my mind technically and professionally or- 
ganized as it is* and with the optical stimulus 
which your presence affords, to remain sitting here 
entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me 
that I am expected to speak, and must speak; 
something forces me to keep on speaking. My 
organs of articulation are continuously innervated 
by outgoing currents, which the currents passing 
inward at my eyes and through my educated brain 
have set in motion ; and the particular movements 
which they make have their form and order deter- 
mined altogether by the training of all my past 
years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on 
the other hand, might seem at first sight purely 
receptive and inactive, — leaving out those among 
you who happen to le taking notes. But the 
very listening which you are carrying on is itself 
a determinate kind of conduct. All the muscular 
tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar 
way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are 
fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is 
over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke 
of behavior, as I said on the previous occasions 
you may be guided differently in some special 
emergency in the schoolroom by words which 
I now let fall— So It is with the impressions you 



GERMAN AND ENGLISH IDEALS 31 

will make there on your pupil. You should get 
into the habit of regarding them all as leading to 
the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior* 
- — emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or 
what not. And, this being the case, you ought 
to feel willing, in a general way, and without 
hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the 
purposes of these lectures with the biological con- 
ception of the mind, as of something given us for 
practical use. That conception will certainly cover 
the greater part of your own educational work. 
« If we reflect upon the various ideals of educa- 
tion that are prevalent in the different countries, 
we see that what they all aim at is to organize 
capacities for conduct. This is most immediately 
obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed 
aim of the higher education is to turn the student 
into an instrument for advancing scientific discov= 
ery. The German universities are proud of the 
number of young specialists whom they turn out 
every year,— not necessarily men of any original 
force of intellect, but men so trained to research 
that when their professor gives them an historical 
or philogicai thesis to prepare, or a bit of labora- 
tory work to do, with a general indication as to 
the best method* they can go off by themselves* 



g2 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

and use apparatus and consult sources in such 
a way as to grind out in the requisite number 
of months some little pepper-corn of new truth 
worthy of being added to the store of extant hu- 
man information on that subject. Little else is 
recognized in Germany as a man's title to academic 
advancement than his ability thus to show himself 
an efficient instrument of research. 

In England, it might seem at first sight as if 
the higher education of the universities aimed at 
the production of certain static types of character 
rather than at the development of what one may 
call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor 
Jowett, when asked what Oxford could do for its 
students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can 
teach an English gentleman how to he an English 
gentleman.** But, if you ask what it means to « be ' 
an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms 
of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman 
is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a 
creature who for all the emergencies of life has 
his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him 
in advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects 
every man to do his duty- 



V. 

THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS 

If all this be true, then immediately one general 
aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to 
dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the 
classroom. 

No reception without reaction, no impression with- 
out correlative expression, — this is the great maxim 
which the teacher ought never to forget. 

An impression which simply flows in at the 
pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his 
active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is 
physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits 
behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even 
as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper ef- 
fect upon the memory ; for, to remain fully among 
the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be 
wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. 
Its motor consequences are what clinch it. Some 
effect due to it in the way of an activity must re- 
turn to the mind in the form of the sensation of 
having acted, and connect itself with the impres- 
sion. The most durable impressions are those on 



34 TALKS TO TEACHERS 






account of which we speak or act, or else are in- 
wardly convulsed. 

The older pedagogic method of learning things 
by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the 
schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing 
merely read or heard, and never verbally repro- 
duced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in 
the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is 
thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior 
on our impressions ; and it is to be feared that, in 
the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as 
the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme 
value of verbal recitation as an element of com- 
plete training may nowadays be too much for- 
gotten. 

When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see 
how enormously the field of reactive conduct has 
been extended by the introduction of all those 
methods of concrete object teaching which are the 
glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reac- 
tions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The 
pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions 
corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. 
In a modern school, therefore, they form only a 
small part of what the pupil is required to do. 
He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, 



THE MANUAL TRAINING METHODS 35 

and maps, take measurements, enter the labora- 
tory and perform experiments, consult authorities, 
and write essays. He must do in his fashion 
what is often laughed at by outsiders when it ap- 
pears in prospectuses under the title of « original 
work,' but what is really the only possible train- 
ing for the doing of original work thereafter. 
The most colossal improvement which recent years 
have seen in secondary education lies in the in- 
troduction of the manual training schools; not 
because they will give us a people more handy 
and practical for domestic life and better skilled 
in trades, but because they will give us citizens 
with an entirely different intellectual fibre. La- 
boratory work and shop work engender a habit 
of observation, a knowledge of the difference be- 
tween accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into 
nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of 
all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, 
which once wrought into the mind, remain there 
as lifelong possessions. They confer precision : 
because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it 
definitely right or definitely wrong. They give 
honesty ; for, when you express yourself by mak- 
ing things, and not by using words, it becomes 
impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or igno- 



36 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ranee by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self- 
reliance; they keep the interest and attention 
always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teach- 
er's disciplinary functions to a minimum. 

Of the various systems of manual training, so 
far as woodwork is concerned, the Swedish Sloyd 
system, if I may have an opinion on such matters, 
seems to me by far the best, psychologically con- 
sidered. Manual training methods, fortunately, 
are being slowly but surely introduced into all 
our large cities. But there is still an immense 
distance to traverse before they shall have gained 
the extension which they are destined ultimately 
to possess. 

No impression without expression, then, — that 
is the first pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary 
conception of the mind as something instrumental 
to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said 
in continuation. The expression itself comes back 
to us, as I intimated a moment ago, in the form of 
a still farther impression, — the impression, namely, 
of what we have done. We thus receive sensible 
news of our behavior and its results. We hear 
the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as 
we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the 
success or failure of our conduct. Now this re- 



MAUKS AND STANDING 37 

turn wave of impression pertains to the complete- 
ness of the whole experience, and a word about 
its importance in the schoolroom may not be out 
of place. 

It would seem only natural to say that, since 
after acting we normally get some return impres- 
sion of result, it must be well to let the pupil get 
such a return impression in every possible case. 
Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks 
and 'standing' and other returns of result are 
concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural 
termination of the cycle of his activities, and often 
suffers from the sense of incompleteness and un- 
certainty ; and there are persons who defend this 
system as encouraging the pupil to work for the 
work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of 
course, here as elsewhere, concrete experience 
must prevail over psychological deduction. But, 
so far as our psychological deduction goes, it 
would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know 
how well he does is in the line of his normal 
completeness of function, and should never be 
balked except for very definite reasons indeed. 

Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and 
standing and prospects, unless in the individual 
case you have some special practical reason for 
not so, doing. 



VL 



NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED RE- 
ACTIONS 

We axe by this time fully launched upon the 
biological conception. Man is an organism for 
reacting on impressions: his mind is there to 
help determine his reactions, and the purpose of 
his education is to make them numerous and per- 
fect. Our education means, in short, little more 
than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at 
home, at school, or in the training of affairs. The 
teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring 
process. 

This being the case, I will immediately state 
a principle which underlies the whole process of 
acquisition and governs the entire activity of the 
teacher. It is this : — 

Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a 
complication grafted on a native reaction, or a sub- 
stitute for a native reaction, which the same object 
originally tended to provoke. 

The teacher's art consists in bringing about the 



NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 39 

substitution or complication, and success in the art 
presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the 
reactive tendencies natively there. 

Without an equipment of native reactions on 
the child's part, the teacher would have no hold 
whatever upon the child's attention or conduct. 
You may take a horse to the water, but you can- 
not make him drink ; and so you may take a child 
to the schoolroom, but you cannot make him learn 
the new tilings you wish to impart, except by 
soliciting him in the first instance by something 
which natively makes him react. He must take 
the first step himself. He must do something 
before you can get your purchase on him. That 
something may be something good or something 
bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction 
at all; for, if bad, you can couple it with conse- 
quences which awake him to its badness. But 
imagine a child so lifeless as to react in no way 
to the teacher's first appeals, and how can you 
possibly take the first step in his education ? 

To make this abstract conception more con- 
crete, assume the case of a young child's training 
in good manners. The child has a native ten- 
dency to snatch with his hands at anything that 
attracts his curiosity ; also to draw back his hands 



40 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

when slapped, to cry under these latter conditions, 
to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate 
one's gestures. 

Suppose now you appear before the child with 
a new toy intended as a present for him. No 
sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch 
it. You slap the hand ; it is withdrawn, and the 
child cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling 
and saying, " Beg for it nicely, — so ! " The child 
stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and 
crows with pleasure ; and that little cycle of train- 
ing is complete. You have substituted the new 
reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of 
snatching, when that kind of impression comes. 

Now, if the child had no memory, the process 
would not be educative. No matter how often 
you came in with a toy, the same series of reac- 
tions would fatally occur, each called forth by its 
own impression: see, snatch; slap, cry; hear, 
ask ; receive, smile. But, with memory there, the 
child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the 
rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap 
and the frustration, recollects the begging and the 
reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes 
the i nice ' reaction for it, and gets the toy immedi- 
ately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. Ii 



NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 



41 



a child's first snatching impulse be excessive or his 
memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline 
may be needed before the acquired reaction comes 
to be an ingrained habit; but in an eminently 
educable child a single experience will suffice. 

One can easily represent the whole process by a 
brain-diagram. Such a diagram can be little more 
than a symbolic translation of the immediate ex- 
perience into spatial terms ; yet it may be useful, 
so I subjoin it. 

CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. 




See — snatch Slap — cry Listen — beg Get — smile 

FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION. 



Figure 1 shows the paths of the four succes- 
sive reflexes executed by the lower or instinc- 
tive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them 
to the higher centres and connect the latter to- 



42 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

gether, represent the processes of memory and as- 
sociation which the reactions impress upon tne 
higher centres as they take place. 

CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. 




beg smile 

FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION. 

In Figure 2 we have the final result. The im- 
pression see awakens the chain of memories, and 
the only reactions that take place are the beg and 
smile. The thought of the slap, connected with 
the activity of Centre 2, inhibits the snatch, and 
makes it abortive, so it is represented only by 
a dotted line of discharge not reaching the termi- 
nus. Ditto of the cry reaction. These are, as 
it were, short-circuited by the current sweeping 
through the higher centres from see to smile. 
Beg and smile, thus substituted for the original 



43 

reaction snatch, become at last the immediate re- 
sponses when the child sees a snatchable object in 
some one's hands. 

The first thing, then, for the teacher to under- 
stand is the native reactive tendencies, — the im- 
pulses and instincts of childhood, — -so as to be 
able to substitute one for another, and turn them 
on to artificial objects. 

It is often said that man is distinguished from 
the lower animals by having a much smaller as- 
sortment of native instincts and impulses than 
they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, 
has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which 
some articulates have; but, if we compare him 
with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that 
he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects 
than any other mammal, that his reactions on 
these objects are characteristic and determinate in 
a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially 
the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach 
him in their analytic curiosity and width of imi- 
tativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, 
get overlaid by the secondary reactions due to his 
superior reasoning power ; but thus man loses the 
simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of in- 



44 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

stinct is only disguised in him, not lost; and 
when the higher brain-functions are in abeyance, 
as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts 
sometimes show their presence in truly brutish 
ways. 

I will therefore say a few words about those 
instinctive tendencies which are the most impor- 
tant from the teacher's point of view. 



VII 

WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE 

First of all, Fear. Fear of punishment has 
always been the great weapon of the teacher, and 
will always, of course, retain some place hi the 
conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so 
familiar that nothing more need be said about it. 

The same is true of Love, and the instinctive 
desire to please those whom we love. The teacher 
who succeeds in getting herself loved by the 
pupils will obtain results which one of a more 
forbidding temperament finds it impossible to 
secure. 

Next, a word might be said about Curiosity. 
This is perhaps a rather poor term by which to 
designate the impulse toward better cognition in its 
full extent ; but you will readily understand what 
I mean. Novelties in the way of sensible objects, 
especially if their sensational quality is bright, 
vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of 
the young and hold it until the desire to know 
more about the object is assuaged. In its higher 



46 



TALKS TO TEACHEES 



more intellectual form, the impulse toward com- 
pleter knowledge takes the character of scientific 
or philosophic curiosity. In both its sensational and 
its intellectual form the instinct is more vivacious 
during childhood and youth than in after life. 
Young children are possessed by curiosity about 
every new impression that assails them. It would 
be quite impossible for a young child to listen to 
a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are 
now listening to me. The outside sights and 
sounds would inevitably carry his attention off. 
And, for most people in middle life, the sort of 
intellectual effort required of the average school- 
boy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his 
algebra or physics, would be" out of the question. 
The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the 
routine details of his business; and new truths, 
especially when they require involved trains of 
close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of 
his capacity. 

The sensational curiosity of childhood is ap- 
pealed to more particularly by certain determinate 
kinds of objects. Material things, things that 
move, living tilings, human actions and accounts 
of human action, will win the attention better than 
anything that is more abstract. Here again comes 



CURIOSITY 47 

in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual 
training methods. The pupil's attention is spon- 
taneously held by any problem that involves the 
presentation of a new material object or of an 
activity on any one's part. The teacher's earliest 
appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown 
or acts performed or described. Theoretic curios- 
ity, curiosity about the rational relations between 
things, can hardly be said to awake at all until 
adolescence is reached. The sporadic metaphysical 
inquiries of children as to who made God, and why 
they have five ringers, need hardly be counted 
here. But, when the theoretic instinct is once 
alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of peda- 
gogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, 
abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a 
fact with which all teachers are familiar. And, 
both in its sensible and in its rational developments, 
disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed 
to in the child with much more certainty than in 
the adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has 
grown so torpid as usually never to awake unless 
it enters into association with some selfish personal 
interest. Of this latter point I will say more 
anon* 



48 TAJIKS TO TEACHEES 

Imitation. Man has always been recognized as 
the imitative animal par excellence. And there is 
hardly a book on psychology, however old, which 
has not devoted at least one paragraph to this 
fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope 
and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man 
has had to wait till the last dozen years to become 
adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in 
his admirably original work, " Les Lois de ITnrita- 
tion " ; and in our own country Professors Royce 
and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all 
the energy that could be desired. Each of us is 
in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of 
his imitativeness. We become conscious of what 
we ourselves are by imitating others — tha con- 
sciousness of what the others are precedes — ■ the 
sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. 
The entire accumulated wealth of mankind — 
languages, arts, institutions, and sciences — is 
passed on from one generation to another by what 
Baldwin has called social heredity, each genera- 
tion simply imitating the last. Into the particu- 
lars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology 
I have no time to go. The moment one hears 
Tarde's proposition uttered, however, one feels 
how supremely true it is. Invention, using the 



IMITATION AND EMULATION 49 

term most broadly, and imitation, are the two 
legs, so to call them, on which the human race 
historically has walked. 

Imitation shades imperceptibly into Emulation, 
Emulation is the impulse to imitate what you see 
another doing, in order not to appear inferior ; and 
it is hard to draw a sharp line between the mani- 
festations of the two. impulses, so inextricably do 
they mix their effects. Emulation is the very 
nerve of human society. Why are you, my hear- 
ers, sitting here before me ? If no one whom you 
ever heard of had attended a « summer school ' or 
teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any 
one of you to break out independently and do a 
thing so unprescribed by fashion ? Probably not. 
Nor would your pupils come to you unless the 
children of their parents' neighbors were all simul- 
taneously being sent to school. We wish not to 
be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut 
off from our share in things which to our neigh- 
bors seem desirable privileges. 

In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play 
absolutely vital parts. Every teacher knows the 
advantage of having certain things performed by 
whole bands of children at a time. The teacher 
who meets with most success is the teacher whose 



60 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

own ways are the most imitable. A teacher 
should never try to make the pupils do a thing 
which she cannot do herself, " Come and let me 
show you how " is an incomparably better stimu- 
lus than "Go and do it as the book directs." 
Children admire a teacher who has skill. What 
he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. 
It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to 
exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest. 
She must first take one herself ; then her example 
is effective as no exhortation can possibly be. 

Every school has its tone, moral and intellect- 
ual. And this tone is a mere tradition kept up by 
imitation, due in the first instance to the example 
set by teachers and by previous pupils of an ag- 
gressive and dominating type, copied by the 
others, and passed on from year to year, so that 
the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. 
Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all ; and 
then always under the modifying influence of new 
personalities aggressive enough in character to set 
new patterns and not merely to copy the old. 
The classic example of this sort of tone is the 
often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's 
administration. He impressed his own character 
as a model on the imagination of the oldest boys, 



EMULATION 61 

who in turn were expected and required to im- 
press theirs upon the younger set. The conta- 
giousness of Arnold's genius was such that a 
Rugby man was said to be recognizable all 
through life by a peculiar turn of character which 
he acquired at school. It is obvious that psychol- 
ogy as such can give in this field no precepts of 
detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, 
success depends mainly on the native genius of 
the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception 
which enable him to seize the right moment and 
to set the right example. 

Among the recent modern reforms of teaching 
methods, a certain disparagement of emulation, as 
a laudable spring of action in the schoolroom, has 
often made itself heard. More than a century 
ago, Rousseau, in his < Entile,' branded rivalry be- 
tween one pupil and another as too base a pas- 
sion to play a part in an ideal education. " Let 
Emile," he said, " never be led to compare himself 
to other children. No rivalries, not even in run- 
ning, as soon as he begins to have the power of 
reason. It were a hundred times better that he 
should not learn at all what he could only learn 
through jealousy or vanity. But I would mark 
out every year the progress he may have made, 



52 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

and I would compare it with the progress of the 
following years. I would say to him : ' You are 
now grown so many inches taller; there is the 
ditch which you jumped over, there is the burden 
which you raised. There is the distance to which 
you could throw a pebble, there the distance you 
could run over without losing breath. See how 
much more you can do now ! ' Thus I should ex- 
cite him without making him jealous of any one. 
He would wish to surpass himself. I can see no 
inconvenience in this emulation with his former 
self." 

Unquestionably, emulation with one's former 
self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and 
has a wide scope in the training of the young. 
But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one 
youth with another, because such rivalry may 
degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does 
seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even 
of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the 
very basis of our being, all social improvement 
being largely due to it. There is a noble and 
generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and 
greedy kind ; and the noble and generous form is 
particularly common in childhood. All games owe 
the zest which they bring with them to the fact 



ITS USEFULNESS IN THE SCHOOLROOM 53 

that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet 
they are the chief means of training in fairness and 
magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw 
such an ally away? Ought we seriously to hope 
that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of 
effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superior- 
ity, should be forever banished from our schools ? 
As a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and 
pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must 
confess my doubts. 

The wise teacher will use this instinct as he 
uses others, reaping its advantages, and appealing 
to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of 
benefit with a minimum of harm ; for, after all, we 
must confess, with a French critic of Rousseau's 
doctrine, that the deepest spring of action in us is 
the sight of action in another. The spectacle of 
effort is what awakens and sustains our own ef- 
fort. No runner running all alone on a race-track 
will find in his own will the power of stimulation 
which his rivalry with other runners incites, when 
he feels them at his heels, about to pass. When a 
trotting horse is ' speeded,' a running horse must 
go beside him to keep him to the pace. 



54 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation 
slides into Ambition ; and ambition connects itself 
closely with Pugnacity and Pride. Consequently, 
these five instinctive tendencies form an inter- 
connected group of factors, hard to separate in the 
determination of a great deal of our conduct. 
The Ambitious Impulses would perhaps be the 
best name for the whole group. 

Pride and pugnacity have often been considered 
unworthy passions to appeal to in the young. 
But in their more refined and noble forms they 
play a great part in the schoolroom and in educa- 
tion generally, being in some characters most po- 
tent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be 
thought of merely in the form of physical com- 
bativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a gen- 
eral unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of 
difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' 
and challenged by arduous achievements, and is 
essential to a spirited and enterprising character. 
We have of late been hearing much of the 
philosophy of tenderness in education; 'interest' 
must be assiduously awakened in everything, diffi- 
culties must be smoothed away. Soft pedagogics 
have taken the place of the old steep and rocky 
■path to learning. But from this lukewarm air the 



OWNERSHIP 55 

bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense 
to suppose that every step in education can be in- 
teresting. The fighting impulse must often be ap- 
pealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed of being 
scared at fractions, of being « downed ' by the law 
of falling bodies ; rouse his pugnacity and pride, 
and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort 
of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best 
moral faculties. A victory scored under such con- 
ditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his 
character. It represents the high-water mark of 
his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pat- 
tern for his self-imitation. The teacher who never 
rouses this sort of pugnacious excitement in his 
pupils falls short of one of his best forms of use- 
fulness. 

The next instinct which I shall mention is that 
of Ownership, also one of the radical endowments 
of the race. It often is the antagonist of imita- 
tion. Whether social progress is due more to 
the passion for keeping old things and habits or to 
the passion of imitating and acquiring new ones 
may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. 
The sense of ownership begins in the second year 
of life. Among the first words which an infant 



56 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

learns to utter are the words 4 my ' and 4 mine,' 
and woe to the parents of twins who fail to pro- 
vide their gifts in duplicate. The depth and 
primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast 
a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon 
all radical forms of communistic Utopia. Private 
proprietorship cannot be practically abolished un- 
til human nature is changed. It seems essential 
to mental health that the individual should have 
something beyond the bare clothes on his back to 
which he can assert exclusive possession, and 
which he may defend adversely against the world. 
Even those religious orders who make the most 
stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary 
to relax the rule a little in favor of the human 
heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinter- 
ested terms. The monk must have his books: 
the nun must have her little garden, and the 
images and pictures in her room. 

In education, the instinct of ownership is fun- 
damental, and can be appealed to in many ways. 
In the house, training in order and neatness be- 
gins with the arrangement of the child's own 
personal possessions. In the school, ownership 
is particularly important in connection with one 
of its special forms of activity, the collecting im- 



UTILITY OF THE COLLECTING IMPULSE 57 

pulse. An object possibly not very interesting 
in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single 
map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills 
a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series. 
Much of the scholarly work of the world, so far 
as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition 
(and this lies at the basis of all our human scholar- 
ship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the 
way in which it gratifies the accumulating and col- 
lecting instinct than to any special appeal which 
it makes to our cravings after rationality. A 
man wishes a complete collection of information, 
wishes to know more about a subject than any- 
body else, much as another may wish to own 
more dollars or more early editions or more en- 
gravings before the letter than anybody else. 

The teacher who can work this impulse into 
the school tasks is fortunate. Almost all children 
collect something. A tactful teacher may get 
them to take pleasure in collecting books; in 
keeping a neat and orderly collection of notes ; in 
starting, when they are mature enough, a card 
catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map 
which they may make. Neatness, order, and 
method are thus instinctively gained, along with 
the other benefits which the possession of the 



58 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

collection entails. Even such a noisome thing as 
a collection of postage stamps may be used by the 
teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographi- 
cal and historical information which she desires to 
impart. Sloyd successfully avails itself of this 
instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection 
of wooden implements fit for his own private use 
at home. Collecting is, of course, the basis of all 
natural history study ; and probably nobody ever 
became a good naturalist who was not an unusu- 
ally active collector when a boy. 

Constructiveness is another great instinctive ten- 
dency with which the schoolroom has to contract 
an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year of 
childhood one may say that the child does hardly 
anything else than handle objects, explore things 
with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up 
and knocking down, putting together and pulling 
apart ; for, from the psychological point of view, 
construction and destruction are two names for 
the same manual activity. Both signify the pro- 
duction of change, and the working of effects, in 
outward things. The result of all this is that in- 
timate famiharity with the physical environment, 
that acquaintance with the properties of material 



CONSTBUCTIYENESS 5S 

things, which is really the foundation of human 
consciousness. To the very last, in most of us, 
the conceptions of objects and their properties 
are limited to the notion of what we can do with 
them. A * stick' means something we can lean 
upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, 
or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; 
* string,' something with which to tie things to- 
gether. For most people these objects have no 
other meaning. In geometry, the cylinder, circle, 
sphere, are denned as what you get by going 
through certain processes of construction, revolv- 
ing a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. 
The more different kinds of things a child thus 
gets to know by treating and handling them, the 
more confident grows his sense of kinship with 
the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic 
adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which 
a child will spend in putting his blocks together 
and rearranging them. But the wise education 
takes the tide at the flood, and from the kinder- 
garten upward devotes the first years of educa- 
tion to training in construction and to object- 
teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I 
said awhile back about the superiority of the 
objective and experimental methods. They oc- 



60 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

cupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the 
spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb 
him, and leave impressions durable and profound. 
Compared with the youth taught by these methods, 
one brought up exclusively by books carries 
through life a certain remoteness from reality: 
he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels 
that he stands so; and often suffers a Mnd of 
melancholy from which he might have been res- 
cued by a more real education. 

There are other impulses, such as love of appro- 
bation or vanity, shyness and secretiveness, of 
which a word might be said; but they are too 
familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the 
subject by your own reflection. There is one 
general law, however, that relates to many of our 
instinctive tendencies, and that has no little impor- 
tance in education; and I must refer to it briefly 
before I leave the subject. It has been called the 
law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our 
impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; 
and, if the appropriate objects be then and there 
provided, habits of conduct toward them are ac- 
quired which last. But, if the objects be not forth- 
coming then, the impulse may die out before a 



THE TKANSITOKINESS OF INSTINCTS 61 

fiabit is formed ; and later it may be hard to teach 
the creature to react appropriately in those direc- 
tions. The sucking instincts in mammals, the 
following instinct in certain birds and quadrupeds, 
are examples of this : they fade away shortly after 
birth. 

In children we observe a ripening of impulses 
and interests in a certain determinate order. 
Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal 
sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, pos- 
sess the child in succession; and in some chil- 
dren the possession, while it lasts, may be of a 
semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the inter- 
est in any one of these things may wholly fade 
away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment 
to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is 
when the native impulse is most acutely present. 
Crowd on the athletic opportunities, the mental 
arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the 
botany, or what not, the moment you have reason 
to think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last 
long, and while it continues you may safely let 
all the child's other occupations take a second 
place* In this way you economize time and 
deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artis- 
tic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but 
a few months* 



62 TAXiKS TO TEACHEBS 

One can draw no specific rules for all this. It 
depends on close observation in the particular 
case, and parents here have a great advantage 
over ^teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness 
has little chance of individualized application in 
the schools. 

Such is the little interested and impulsive psy- 
chophysical organism whose springs of action the 
teacher must divine, and to whose ways he must 
become accustomed. He must start with the na- 
tive tendencies, and enlarge the pupiPs entire pas- 
sive and active experience. He must ply him 
with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste 
the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole 
context of remembered experience is what shall 
determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, 
and not the bare immediate impression. As the 
pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets fuller and fuller 
of all sorts of memories and associations and sub- 
stitutions | but the eye accustomed to psychologi- 
cal analysis will discern, underneath it all, the 
outlines of our simple psychophysical scheme. 

Respect then, I beg you, always the original 
reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome 
their connection with certain objects, and to sup- 



BAB AID GOOD BEHAVIOB m 

plant them with others that you wish to make tne 
rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of 
the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point as 
good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may 
sound to say fo, it is often a better starting-point 
than good behavior would be. 

The acquired reactions must be made habitual 
whenever they are appropriate. Therefore Habit 
is the next subject to which your attention m 
invited 



VIII. 
THE LAWS OP HABIT 

It is very important that teachers should realize 
the importance of habit, and psychology helps 
us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of 
good habits and of bad habits 5 but, when people 
use the word ' habit,' in the majority of instances it 
is a bad habit which they have in mind. They 
talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit 
and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention* 
habit or the moderation-habit or the courage- 
habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits 
as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it 
has definite form, is but a mass of habits,- — prac* 
tical, emotional, and intellectual, — systematically 
organized for our weal, or woe, and bearing us 
irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the lat* 
ter may be. 

Since pupils can understand this at a compara- 
tively early age, and since to understand it con- 
tributes in no small measure to their feeling of 
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were 



HABIT A SECOND NATURE 65 

able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of 
habit in some such abstract terms as I am now 
about to talk of it to you. 

I believe that we are subject to the law of habit 
in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. 
The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous 
system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing 
with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more 
and more easily, and finally, with sufficient prac- 
tice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any 
consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have 
(in Dr. Carpenter's words) grown to the way in 
which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of 
paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to 
fall forever afterward into the same identical 
folds. 

Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the 
Duke of Wellington said, it is «ten times nature,' 
— at any rate as regards its importance in adult 
life ; for the acquired habits of our training have 
by that time inhibited or strangled most of the 
natural impulsive tendencies which were origi- 
nally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, 
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our 
activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our 
rising in the morning to our lying down each 



66 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating 
and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat« 
raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay* 
even most of the forms of our common speech, are 
things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to 
be classed as reflex actions. To each sort of im- 
pression we have an automatic, ready-made re- 
sponse. My very words to you now are an exam- 
ple of what I mean ; for having already lectured 
upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a 
book, and read the latter when in print, I find my 
tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and 
repeating almost literally what I said before. 

So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we 
are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of 
our past selves. And since this, under any cir- 
cumstances, is what we always tend to become, 
it follows first of all that the teacher's prime con- 
cern should he to ingrain into the pupil that as- 
sortment of habits that shall be most useful to 
him throughout life. Education is for behavior, 
and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. 

To quote my earlier book directly, the great 
thing in all education is to make our nervous sys- 
tem our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund 
and capitalize our acquisitions* and live at ease 



VALUE OF GOOD HABITS 6T 

upon the interest of the fund. For this we must 
make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, 
as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully 
guard against the growing into ways that are 
likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the 
details of our daily life we can hand over to the 
effortless custody of automatism, the more our 
higher powers of mind will be set free for their 
own proper work. There is no more miserable 
human being than one in whom nothing is habit- 
ual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of 
every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time 
of rising and going to bed every day, and the 
beginning of every bit of work are subjects of 
express volitional deliberation. Full half the time 
of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting 
of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him 
as practically not to exist for his consciousness at 
all. If there be such daily duties not yet in- 
grained in any one of my hearers, let him begin 
1his very hour to set the matter right. 

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral 
Habits' there are some admirable practical re- 
marks laid down. Two great maxims emerge 
from the treatment. The first is that in the ac- 
quisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an 



08 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

old one, we must take care to launch ourselves 
with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. 
Accumulate all the possible circumstances which 
shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself 
assiduously in conditions that encourage the new 
way; make engagements incompatible with the 
old ; take a public pledge, if the case allows ; in 
short, envelope your resolution with every aid 
you know. This will give your new beginning 
such a momentum that the temptation to break 
down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might ; 
and every day during which a breakdown is post 
poned adds to the chances of its not occurring 
at all. 

I remember long ago reading in an Austrian 
paper the advertisement of a certain Rudolph 
Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to 
any one who after that date should find him at 
the wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. 'This I 
do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence 
of a promise which I have made my wife.' With 
such a wife, and such an understanding of the 
way in which to start new habits, it would be 
safe to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate 
success. 

The second maxim is, Never suffer an exception 



MAXIMS FOB HAB1T-FOBMING 69 

to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in yout 
life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball ol 
string which one is carefully winding up : a single 
slip undoes more than a great many turns will 
wind again. Continuity of training is the great 
means of making the nervous system act infallibly 
right. As Professor Bain says : — 

" The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradis- 
tinguishing them from the intellectual acquisi- 
tions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one 
to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the 
other. It is necessary above all things, in such a 
situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on 
the wrong side undoes the effect of many con- 
quests on the right. The essential precaution, 
therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing 
powers that the one may have a series of unin. 
terrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it 
to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the 
opposition, under any circumstances. This is tbe 
theoretically best career of mental progress." 

A third maxim may be added to the preceding 
pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act 
on every resolution you make, and on every em& 
tional prompting you may experience in the direc- 
tion of the habits you asmre to gain. It is not m. 



70 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

the moment of their forming, but in the moment 
of their producing motor effects, that resolves and 
aspirations communicate the new 'set* to the 
brain. 

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one 
may possess, and no matter how good one's senti- 
ments may be, if one have not taken advantage of 
every concrete opportunity to act, one's character 
may remain entirely unaffected for the better. 
With good intentions, hell proverbially is paved. 
This is an obvious consequence of the principles 
I have laid down. A « character,' as J. S. Mill says, 
« is a completely fashioned will ' ; and a will, in the 
sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of 
tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and defi- 
nite way upon all the principal emergencies of 
life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively 
ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted 
frequency with which the actions actually occur, 
and the brain « grows ' to their use. When a re- 
solve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evap- 
orate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse 
than a chance lost: it works so as positively to 
hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak- 
ing the normal path of discharge. There is no 
more contemptible type of human character than 



MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING Tl 

that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, 
who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibil 
ity, but never does a concrete manly deed. 

This leads to a fourth maxim. BonH preach 
too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in 
the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical 
opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they 
pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils 
both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of 
behavior are what give the new set to the charac- 
ter, and work the good habits into its organic 
tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become 
an ineffectual bore, 

There is a passage in Darwin's short auto 
biography which has been often quoted, and 
which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject 
of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says: 
"Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of 
many kinds gave me great pleasure ; and even as 
a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, 
especially in the historical plays. I have also said 
that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and 
music very great delight. But now for many years 
I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have 
tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so 



Tg TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also 
almost lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . My 
mind seems to have become a kind of machine for 
grinding general laws out of large collections of 
facts ; but why this should have caused the atrophy 
of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher 
tastes depend, I cannot conceive. ... If I had to 
live my life again, I would have made a rule to 
read some poetry and listen to some music at 
least once every week; for perhaps the parts of 
my brain now atrophied would thus have been 
kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is 
a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious 
to the intellect, and more probably to the moral 
character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our 
nature." 

We all intend when young to be all that may 
become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. 
We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to 
grow more and more intelligent about pictures 
and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and 
religious ideas, and even not to let the greater 
philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite 
beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I 
say; and yet In how many middle-aged men and 
women is such an honest and sanguine expectation 



DABWIN'S CASE AS A WARNING 73 

fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few ; and the 
laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each 
of these things arises in everybody at the proper 
age ; but, if not persistently fed with the appropri- 
ate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and 
necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by 
the rival interests to which the daily food is 
given. We make ourselves into Darwins in this 
negative respect by persistently ignoring the es- 
sential practical conditions of our case. We say 
abstractly: "I mean to enjoy poetry, and to ab- 
sorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep 
up my love of music, to read the books that shall 
give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep 
my higher spiritual side alive, etc." But we do 
not attack these things concretely, and we do not 
begin to-day. We forget that every good that is 
worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of 
daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until 
those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten 
minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or 
meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, 
pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now 
and suffered no remission, would infallibly give 
os in due time the fulness of all we desire. By 
neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing 



f 4 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively 
digging the graves of our higher possibilities. 
This is a point concerning which you teachers 
might well give a little timely information to your 
older and more aspiring pupils. 

According as a function receives daily exercise 
or not, the man becomes a different kind of being 
in later life. We have lately had a number of 
accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who 
talked freely of life and philosophy. More than 
one of them has confided to me that the sight of 
our faces, all contracted as they are with the habit- 
ual American over-intensity and anxiety of expres- 
sion, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes 
when sitting, made on him arvery painful impres- 
sion. " I do not see," said one, " how it is possible 
for you to live as you do, without a single minute 
in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and 
meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo 
life to retire for at least half an hour daily into 
silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, 
and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo 
child is trained to this from a very early age." 
The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious 
in the physical repose and lack of tension, and 
the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial 



THE HABIT OF RELAXATION 75 

expression, and imperturbability of manner of 
these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were 
depriving themselves of an essential grace of char- 
acter. How many American children ever hear it 
said by parent or teacher, that they should moder- 
ate their piercing voices, that they should relax 
their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when 
sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, 
not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex 
influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless 
over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are 
working on us grievous national harm. 

I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of 
this matter. Perhaps you can help our rising gen- 
eration of Americans toward the beginning of a 
better set of personal ideals.* 

To go back now to our general maxims, I may 
at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about 
habits, offer something like this : Keep the faculty 
of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise 
every day. That is, be systematically heroic in 
little unnecessary points, do every day or two 
something for no other reason than its difficulty, 
so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it 

*See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume. 



► *•• 



76 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand 
the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur- 
ance which a man pays on his house and goods. 
The tax does him no good at the time, and possi- 
bly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire 
does come, his having paid it will be his salvation 
from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured 
himself to habits of concentrated attention, ener- 
getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. 
He will stand like a tower when everything rocks 
around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are win- 
nowed like chaff in the blast. 

I have been accused, when talking of the sub- 
ject of habit, of making old habits appear so 
strong that the acquiring of new ones, and partic- 
ularly anything like a sudden reform or conver- 
sion, would be made impossible by my doctrine. 
Of course, this would suffice to condemn the lat- 
ter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent 
they may be, unquestionably do occur. But there 
is no incompatibility between the general laws I 
have laid down and the most startling sudden 
alterations in the way of character. New habits 
can be launched, I have expressly said, on condi- 
tion of there being new stimuli and new excite- 



THE SCOPE OF HABIT'S EFFECTS 77 

ments. Now life abounds in these, and sometimes 
they are such critical and revolutionary experi- 
ences that they change a man's whole scale of 
values and system of ideas. In such cases, the 
old order of his habits will be ruptured ; and, if 
the new motives are lasting, new habits will be 
formed, and build up in him a new or regener- 
ate 'nature.' 

All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the 
general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, 
and the physiological study of mental conditions 
still remains on the whole the most powerful ally 
of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured here- 
after, of which theology tells, is no worse than the 
hell we make for ourselves in this world by habit- 
ually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. 
Could the young but realize how soon they will 
become mere walking bundles of habits, they 
would give more heed to their conduct while in 
the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, 
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every 
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its 
never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Win- 
kle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every 
fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this 
time I " Well, he may not count it, and a kind 
Heaven may not count it#„ but it is being counted 



78 TAIiKS TO TEACSWm 

none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and 
fibres the molecules are counting it, registering 
and storing it up to be used against him when the 
next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, 
in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. 

Of course, this has its good side as well as its 
bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by 
so many separate drinks, so we become saints in 
the moral, and authorities and experts in the 
practical and scientific spheres, by so many sepa- 
rate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have 
any anxiety about the upshot of his education, 
whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faith- 
fully busy each hour of the working day, he may 
safely leave the final result to itself. He can with 
perfect certainty count on waking up some fine 
morning to find himself one of the competent 
ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he 
may have singled out. Silently, between all the 
details of his business, the poiver of judging in 
all that class of matter will have built itself up 
within him as a possession that will never pass 
away. Young people should know this truth in 
advance. The ignorance of it has probably en- 
gendered more discouragement and faint-hearted- 
ness in youths embarking on arduous careers 
than all other causes out together 



EL 

THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 

In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly 
had in mind our motor habits, — habits of external 
conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes 
are also largely subject to the law of habit, and 
one result of this is a phenomenon which you all 
know under the name of ' the association of ideas/ 
To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn. 

You remember that consciousness is an ever* 
flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive 
tendencies. We saw already that its phases or 
pulses are like so many fields or waves, each 
field or wave having usually its central point of 
liveliest attention, in the shape of the most promi- 
nent object in our thought, while all around this 
lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, 
together with the margin of emotional and 
active tendencies which the whole entails. De- 
scribing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as 
close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might 
seem as if, in the fluiditv of these successive Avaves, 



80 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

everything is indeterminate. But inspection 

shows that each wave has a constitution which 
can be to some degree explained by the constitu- 
tion of the waves just passed away. And this 
relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed 
by the two fundamental 4 laws of association,' so- 
called, of which the first is named the Law of 
Contiguity, the second that of Similarity. 

The Law of Contiguity tells us that objects 
thought of in the coming wave are such as in some 
previous experience were next to the objects repre- 
sented in the wave that is passing away. The 
vanishing objects were once formerly their neigh- 
bors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet 
or your prayers, or when the sight of an object 
reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you 
of the object, it is through the law of contiguity 
that the terms are suggested to the mind. 

The Law of Similarity says that, when contigu- 
ity fails to describe what happens, the coming 
objects will prove to resemble the going objects, 
even though the two were never experienced 
together before. In our « flights of fancy,' this is 
frequently the case. 

If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, 
we ask the question, " How came we to be think' 



THB TWO LAWS OF ASSOCIATION 81 

ing of just this object now?" we can almost al- 
ways trace its presence to some previous object 
which has introduced it to the mind, according to 
one or the other of these laws. The entire rou- 
tine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, 
is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Con- 
tiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of 
trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties 
of material things, are all known to us as definite 
systems or groups of objects which cohere in an 
order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of 
which any one part reminds us of the others. In 
dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental se- 
quences flow along these lines of habitual rou- 
tine repetition and suggestion. 

In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, 
the routine is broken through with ease at any 
moment; and one field of mental objects will sug- 
gest another with which perhaps in the whole his- 
tory of human thinking it had never once before 
been coupled. The link here is usually some anal- 
ogy between the objects successively thought of, — 
an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel 
it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground £ as 
where, for example, we find something masculine 
in the color red and something feminine in the 



82 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

color pale blue, or where, of three human beings* 
characters, one will remind us of a cat, another 
of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow. 

Psychologists have of course gone very deeply 
into the question of what the causes of association 
may be ; and some of them have tried to show that 
contiguity and similarity are not two radically 
diverse laws, but that either presupposes the pres- 
ence of the other. I myself am disposed to think 
that the phenomena of association depend on our 
cerebral constitution, and are not immediate con^ 
sequences of our being rational beings. In other 
words, when we shall have become disembodied 
spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness 
will follow different laws. These questions are 
discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope 
that some of you will be interested in following 
them there. But I will, on the present occasion, 
ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is thefaet 
of association that practically concerns you, let 
its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they 
may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reduci- 
ble, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they are, 
are at any rate little pieces of associating machin- 
ery. Their education consists in the organizing 



THEIR GREAT SCOPE 83 

within them of determinate tendencies to associate 
one thing with another, — impressions with eonse 
quences, these with reactions, those with results, 
and so on indefinitely. The more copious the 
associative systems, the completer the individual's 
adaptations to the world. 

The teacher can formulate his function to him- 
self therefore in terms of « association ' as well as 
in terms of « native and acquired reaction.' It is 
mainly that of building up useful systems of asso- 
ciation in the pupil's mind. This description 
sounds wider than the one I began by giving. 
But, when one thinks that our trains of associa- 
tion, whatever they may be, normally issue in ac- 
quired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a 
general way the same mass of facts is covered by 
loth formulas. 

It is astonishing how many mental operations 
we can explain when we have once grasped the 
principles of association. The great problem which 
association undertakes to solve is, Why does just 
this particular field of consciousness, constituted in 
this particular way, now appear before my mind$ 
It may be a field of objects imagined ; it may be 
of objects remembered or of objects perceived ; it 
may include an action resolved on. In either case, 






84 TALKS TO TEACHERS 



when the field is analyzed into its parts, those 
parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts 
of fields previously before consciousness, in con- 
sequence of one or other of the laws of association 
just laid down. Those laws run the mind : inter- 
est, shifting hither and thither, deflects it ; and 
attention, as we shall later see, steers it and keeps 
it from too zigzag a course. 

To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid 
and simple understanding of the psychological 
machinery. The 'nature,' the 'character,' of an 
individual means really nothing but the habitual 
form of his associations. To break up bad associa- 
tions or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide 
the associative tendencies into the most fruitful 
channels, is the educator's principal task. But 
here, as with all other simple principles, the dif- 
ficulty lies in the application. Psychology can 
state the laws : concrete tact and talent alone can 
work them to useful results. 

Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest expe- 
rience that our minds may pass from one object to 
another by various intermediary fields of conscious- 
ness. The indeterminateness of our paths of asso- 
ciation in concreto is thus almost as striking a feat- 
ure of them as the uniformity of their abstract 



INDETEKMINATENESS OF ASSOCIATIONS 85 

form. Start from any idea whatever, and the 
entire range of your ideas is potentially at your 
disposal. If we take as the associative starting- 
point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce 
before you, there is no limit to the possible diver- 
sity of suggestions which it may set up in your 
minds. Suppose I say « blue,' for example : some 
of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather 
from which we now are suffering, then go off on 
thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly of meteo- 
rology at large ; others may think of the spectrum 
and the physiology of color-vision, and glide into 
X-rays and recent physical speculations; others 
may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers 
on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal 
reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and 
linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue 
may be ' apperceived ' as a synonym for melan- 
choly, and a train of associates connected with 
morbid psychology may proceed to unroll them- 
selves. 

In the same person, the same word heard at 
different times will provoke, in consequence of 
the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of 
a number of diverse possible associative sequences. 
Professor Miinsterberg performed this experiment 



86 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

methodically, using the same words four times 
over, at three-month intervals, as ' cues ' for four 
different persons who were the subjects of obser- 
vation. He found almost no constancy in their 
associations taken at these different times. In 
short, the entire potential content of one's con- 
sciousness is accessible from any one of its points. 
This is why we can never work the laws of asso- 
ciation forward: starting from the present field 
as a cue, we can never cipher out in advance just 
what the person will be thinking of five minutes 
later. The elements which may become prepo- 
tent in the process, the parts of each successive 
field round which the associations shall chiefly 
turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are 
so numerous and ambiguous as to be indetermina- 
ble before the fact. But, although we cannot 
work the laws of association forward, we can 
always work them backwards. We cannot say 
now what we shall find ourselves thinking of 
five minutes hence ; but, whatever it may be, we 
shall then be able to trace it through intermediary 
links of contiguity or similarity to what we are 
thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is 
the shifting part played by the margin and focus — 
in fact, by each element by itself of the margin or 
f ocus — m calling up the naxfc ideas. 



SOME CUES ARE PREPOTENT 87 

For example, I am reciting « Locksley Hall,' in 
order to divert my mind from a state of suspense 
that I am in concerning the will of a relative that 
is dead. The will still remains in the mental 
background as an extremely marginal or ultra- 
marginal portion of my field of consciousness ; but 
the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until 
I come to the line, " I, the heir of all the ages, in 
the foremost files of time." The words ' I, the 
heir,' immediately make an electric connection 
with the marginal thought of the will; that, in 
turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of 
my possible legacy, so that I throw down the book 
and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my 
future fortune pouring through my mind. Any 
portion of the field of consciousness that has more 
potentialities of emotional excitement than an- 
other may thus be roused to predominant activ- 
ity ; and the shifting play of interest now in one 
portion, now in another, deflects the currents in 
all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity run- 
ning hither and thither as the sparks run in 
burnt>up paper. 

One more point, and I shall have said as much 
to you as seems necessary about the process of 
association. 



88 TALKS TO TEACHEKS 

You just saw how a single exciting word may 
call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect 
our whole train of thinking from the previous 
track. The fact is that every portion of the field 
tends to call up its own associates ; but, if these 
associates be severally different, there is rivalry, 
and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective 
the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, 
and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our ex- 
ample, does the process seem to turn round a 
single item in the mental field, or even round the 
entire field that is immediately in the act of pass- 
ing. It is a matter of constellation, into which 
portions of fields that are already past especially 
seem to enter and have their say. Thus, to go 
back to 'Locksley Hall,' each word as I recite it 
in its due order is suggested not solely by the 
previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is 
rather the effect of all the previous words, taken 
together, of the verse. " Ages," for example, calls 
no " in the foremost files of time," when preceded 
by " I, the heir of all the " — ; but, when preceded 
by "for I doubt not through the," — it calls up 
"one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I 
write on the blackboard the letters ABODE 
F, . . . they probably suggest to you G H I. . . • 



THE PUPIL AN ASSOCIATING MACHINE 89 

But, if I write ABADDEF, if they suggest 
anything, they suggest as their complement E C T 
or E F I C I E N C Y. The result depending on 
the total constellation, even though most of the 
single items be the same. 

My practical reason for mentioning this law is 
this, that it follows from it that, in working asso- 
ciations into your pupils' minds, you must not rely 
on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as 
possible. Couple the desired reaction with numer- 
ous constellations of antecedents, — don't always 
ask the question, for example, in the same way; 
don't use the same kind of data in numerical 
problems ; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as 
you can. When we come to the subject of mem- 
ory, we shall learn still more about this. 

So much, then, for the general subject of asso- 
ciation. In leaving it for other topics (in which, 
however, we shall abundantly find it involved 
again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire 
a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative 
terms. All governors of mankind, from doctors 
and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, 
instinctively come so to conceive their charges. 
If you do the same, thinking of them (however 
else you may think of them besides) as so many 



90 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

little systems of associating machinery, you will 
be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their 
operations and at the practicality of the results 
which you will gain. We think of our acquain- 
tances, for example, as characterized by certain 
'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost 
every instance prove to be tendencies to associa- 
tion. Certain ideas in them are always followed 
by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings 
and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent 
or decline. If the topic arouse one of those first 
ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well 
foreseen. ' Types of character ' in short are 
largely types of association. 



INTEREST 

At our last meeting I treated of the native ten- 
dencies of the pupil to react in characteristically 
definite ways upon different stimuli or exciting 
circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's in- 
stincts. Now some situations appeal to special 
instincts from the very outset, and others fail to 
do so until the proper connections have been or- 
ganized in the course of the person's training. 
We say of the former set of objects or situations 
that they are interesting in themselves and origi- 
nally. Of the latter we say that they are natively 
uninteresting, and that interest in them has first 
to be acquired. 

No topic has received more attention from peda- 
gogical writers than that of interest. It is the 
natural sequel to the instincts we so lately dis- 
cussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the 
next subject which we take up. 

Since some objects are natively interesting and 
in others interest is artificially acquired, the 



92 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

teacher must know which the natively interesting 
ones are ; for, as we shall see immediately, other 
objects can artificially acquire an interest only 
through first becoming associated with some of 
these natively interesting things. 

The native interests of children lie altogether in 
the sphere of sensation. Novel things to look at 
or novel sounds to hear, especially when they in- 
volve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will 
always divert the attention from abstract concep- 
tions of objects verbally taken in. The grimace 
that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy 
is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or 
the distant firebells ringing, — these are the rivals 
with which the teacher's powers of being inter- 
esting have incessantly to cope. The child will 
always attend more to what a teacher does than 
to what the same teacher says. During the per- 
formance of experiments or while the teacher is 
drawing on the blackboard, the children are tran- 
quil and absorbed. I have seen a roomful of col- 
lege students suddenly become perfectly still, to 
look at their professor of physics tie a piece of 
string around a stick which he was going to use 
in an experiment, but immediately grow restless 
when he began to explain the experiment. A 



NATIVELY INTERESTING THINGS 93 

lady told me that one day, during a lesson, she 
was delighted at having captured so completely 
the attention of one of her young charges. He 
did not remove his eyes from her face; but he 
said to her after the lesson was over, " I looked at 
you all the time, and your upper jaw did not 
move once ! " That was the only fact that he had 
taken in. 

Living things, then, moving things, or things 
that savor of danger or of blood, that have a dra- 
matic quality, — these are the objects natively in- 
teresting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost 
everything else; and the teacher of young chil- 
dren, until more artificial interests have grown up, 
will keep in touch with her pupils by constant 
appeal to such matters as these. Instruction must 
be carried on objectively, experimentally, anec- 
dotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-tell- 
ing must constantly come in. But of course these 
methods cover only the first steps, and carry one 
but a little way. 

Can we now formulate any general principle by 
which the later and more artificial interests con- 
nect themselves with these early ones that the 
child brings with him to the school? 

Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law 



94 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

that relates the acquired and the native interests 
with each other. 

Any object not interesting in itself may become 
interesting through becoming associated with an 
object in which an interest already exists. The two 
associated objects grow, as it were, together: -the 
interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole ; 
and thus things not interesting in their own right 
borrow an interest which becomes as real and as 
strong as that of any natively interesting thing. 
The odd circumstance is that the borrowing does 
not impoverish the source, the objects taken "to- 
gether being more interesting, perhaps, than the 
originally interesting portion was by itself. 

This is one of the most striking proofs of the 
range of application of the principle of association 
oi ideas in psychology. An idea will infect an- 
other with its own emotional interest when they 
have become both associated together into any 
sort of a mental total. As there is no limit to 
the various associations into which an interest- 
ing idea may enter, one sees in how many ways 
an interest may be derived. 

You will understand this abstract statement 
easily if I take the most frequent of concrete ex- 
amples, — the interest which things borrow from 



HOW INTEREST IS ACQUIRED 95 

their connection with our own personal welfare. 
The most natively interesting object to a man is 
his own personal self and its fortunes. We ac- 
cordingly see that the moment a thing becomes 
connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith 
becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his 
books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give 
them to him, make them his own, and notice the 
new light with which they instantly shine in his 
eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them alto- 
gether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a 
man's business or profession, intolerable in itself, 
is shot through with engrossing significance be- 
cause he knows it to be associated with his per- 
sonal fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting 
object can there be than a railroad time-table? 
Yet where will you find a more interesting object 
if you are going on a journey, and by its meana 
can find your train ? At such times the time-table 
will absorb a man's entire attention, its interest 
being borrowed solely from its relation to his per- 
sonal life. From all these facts there emerges a 
very simple abstract programme for the teacher to 
follow in keeping the attention of the child : Begin 
with the line of his native interests, and offer him 
objects that have some immediate connection with 



96 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

these. The kindergarten methods, the object- 
teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-train- 
ing work, — all recognize this feature. Schools 
in which these methods preponderate are schools 
where discipline is easy, and where the voice of 
the master claiming order and attention in threat- 
ening tones need never be heard. 

Next, step by step, connect with these first objects 
and experiences the later objects and ideas which 
you wish to instill. Associate the new with the old 
in some natural and telling way, so that the interest, 
being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses 
the entire system of objects of thought. 

This is the abstract statement ; and, abstractly, 
nothing can be easier to understand. It is in the 
fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies ; for 
the difference between an interesting and a tedious 
teacher consists in little more than the inventive- 
ness by which the one is able to mediate these 
associations and connections, and in the dulness in 
discovering such transitions which the other shows. 
One teacher's mind will fairly coruscate with 
points of connection between the new lesson and 
the circumstances of the children's other experi- 
ence. Anecdotes and reminiscences will abound 
in her talk ; and the shuttle of interest will shoot 



SOMETHING TO ATTEND WITH 97 

backward and forward, weaving the new and the 
old together in a lively and entertaining way. 
Another teacher has no such inventive fertility, 
and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy 
thing. This is the psychological meaning of the 
Herbartian principle of 'preparation' for each 
lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. 
It is the psychological meaning of that whole 
method of concentration in studies of which you 
have been recently hearing so much. When the 
geography and English and history and arithmetic 
simultaneously make cross-references to one an- 
other, you get an interesting set of processes all 
along the line. 

If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your 
pupils, there is only one way to do it ; and that is 
to make certain that they have something in their 
minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. 
That something can consist in nothing but a 
previous lot of ideas already interesting in them- 
selves, and of such a nature that the incoming 
novel objects which you present can dovetail into 
them and form with them some kind of a logically 
associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, al- 
most any kind of a connection is sufficient to 



98 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

carry the interest along. What a help is our 
Philippine war at present in teaching geography ! 
But before the war you could ask the children if 
they ate pepper with their eggs, and where they 
supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if 
glass is a stone, and, if not, why not ; and then let 
them know how stones are formed and glass manu- 
factured. External links will serve as well as 
those that are deeper and more logical. But in- 
terest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to re- 
main always with that subject. Our acquisitions 
become in a measure portions of our personal self ; 
and little by little, as cross-associations multiply 
and habits of familiarity and practice grow, the 
entire system of our objects of thought consoli- 
dates, most of it becoming interesting for some 
purposes and in some degree. 

An adult man's interests are almost every one of 
them intensely artificial : they have slowly been 
built up. The objects of professional interest are 
most of them, in their original nature, repulsive ; 
but by their connection with such natively excit- 
ing objects as one's personal fortune, one's social 
responsibilities, and especially by the force of in- 
veterate habit, they grow to be the only things for 
which in middle life a man profoundly caves. 



THE SYSTEM OF OUR INTERESTS 99 

But in all these the spread and consolidation 
have followed nothing but the principles first laid 
down. If we could recall for a moment our whole 
individual history, we should see that our pro- 
fessional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due 
to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental 
object to another, traceable backward from point 
to point till we reach the moment when, in the 
nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story 
told, some little object shown, some little opera- 
tion witnessed, brought the first new object and 
new interest within our ken by associating it with 
some one of those primitively there. The interest 
now suffusing the whole system took its rise in 
that little event, so insignificant to us now as to 
be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming 
cling to one another in layers till the few are 
reached whose feet grapple the bough from which 
the swarm depends; so with the objects of our 
thinking, — they hang to each other by associated 
links, but the original source of interest in all of 
them is the native interest which the earliest one 
once possessed. 






XI. 

ATTENTION 

Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of 
attention, for to say that an object is interesting 
is only another way of saying that it excites atten- 
tion. But in addition to the attention which 
any object already interesting or just becoming 
interesting claims — passive attention or sponta- 
neous attention, we may call it — there is a more 
deliberate attention, — voluntary attention or atten- 
tion with effort, as it is called, — which we can give 
to objects less interesting or uninteresting in them- 
selves. The distinction between active and pas- 
sive attention is made in all books on psychology, 
and connects itself with the deeper aspects of the 
topic. From our present purely practical point of 
view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate ; 
and passive attention to natively interesting ma- 
terial requires no further elucidation on this occa- 
sion. All that we need explicitly to note is that, 
the more the passive attention is relied on, by 
keeping the material interesting; and the less the 



ATTENTION AND GENIUS 101 

kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to ; 
the more smoothly and pleasantly the class-room 
work goes on. I must say a few more words, 
however, about this latter process of voluntary 
and deliberate attention. 

One often hears it said that genius is nothing 
but a power of sustained attention, and the popu- 
lar impression probably prevails that men of 
genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers 
in this direction. But a little introspective obser- 
vation will show any one that voluntary attention 
cannot be continuously sustained, — that it comes in 
beats. When we are studying an uninteresting 
subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to 
bring back our attention every now and then by 
using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the 
topic for a moment, the mind then running on for 
a certain, number of seconds or minutes with spon- 
taneous interest, until again some intercurrent 
idea captures it and takes it off. Then the proc- 
esses of volitional recall must be repeated once 
more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a 
momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, 
exhausts itself in the single act ; and, unless the 
matter is then taken in hand by some trace of 
interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to 



102 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

follow it at all. The sustained attention of the 
genius, sticking to his subject for hours together, 
is for the most part of the passive sort. The 
minds of geniuses are full of copious and original 
associations. The subject of thought, once started, 
develops all sorts of fascinating consequences. The 
attention is led along one of these to another in 
the most interesting manner, and the attention 
never once tends to stray away. 

In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a 
subject develops much less numerous associates: 
it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to 
keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his 
attention back to it by a violent wrench. In him, 
therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention re- 
ceives abundant opportunity for cultivation in 
daily life. It is your despised business man, your 
common man of affairs, (so looked down on by the 
literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this 
regard is likely to be most developed ; for he has 
to listen to the concerns of so many uninteresting 
people, and to transact so much drudging detail, 
that the faculty in question is always kept in 
training. A genius, on the contrary, is the man 
in whom you are least likely to find the power of 
attending to anything insipid or distasteful in 



CONDITIONS OF VOLUNTARY ATTENTION 103 

itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his 
letters unanswered, neglects his family duties in- 
corrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his at- 
tention down and back from those more interest- 
ing trains of imagery with which his genius con- 
stantly occupies his mind. 

Voluntary attention is thus an essentially in- 
stantaneous affair. You can claim it, for your 
purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in 
loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it 
in this way. But, unless the subject to which you 
thus recall their attention has inherent power to 
interest the pupils, you will have got it for only 
a brief moment; and their minds will soon be 
wandering again. To keep them where you have 
called them, you must make the subject too inter- 
esting for them to wander again. And for that 
there is one prescription; but the prescription, 
like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get 
practical results from it, you must couple it with 
mother-wit. 

The prescription is that the subject must he made 
to show new aspects of itself ; to prompt new ques 
tions ; in a word, to change. From an unchanging 
subject the attention inevitably wanders away. 
You can test this by the simplest possible case of 



104 



TALKS TO TEACHERS 



sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to 
a dot on the paper or on the wall. You pres- 
ently find that one or the other of two things has 
happened: either your field of vision has become 
blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at 
all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look 
at the dot in question, and are looking at some- 
thing else. But, if you ask yourself successive 
questions about the dot, — how big it is, how far, 
of what shape, what shade of color, etc. ; in other 
words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in 
various ways, and along with various kinds of asso- 
ciates, — you can keep your mind on it for a com- 
paratively long time. This is what the genius 
does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and 
grows. And this is what the teacher must do for 
every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent ap- 
peals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. 
In all respects, reliance upon such attention as 
this is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper 
and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect 
results. The teacher who can get along by keep- 
ing spontaneous interest excited must be regarded 
as the teacher with the greatest skill. 

There is, however, in all schoolroom work a 
large mass of material that must be dull and un- 



MECHANICAL AIDS TO ATTENTION 105 

exciting, and to which it is impossible in any con- 
tinuous way to contribute an interest associatively 
derived. There are, therefore, certain external 
methods, which every teacher knows, of volun- 
tarily arousing the attention from time to time 
and keeping it upon the subject. Mr. Fitch has 
a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he 
briefly passes these methods in review; the post- 
ure must be changed; places can be changed. 
Questions, after being answered singly, may occa- 
sionally be answered in concert. Elliptical ques- 
tions may be asked, the pupil supplying the miss- 
ing word. The teacher must pounce upon the 
most listless child and wake him up. The habit 
of prompt and ready response must be kept up. 
Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of 
order, and ruptures of routine, — all these are 
means for keeping the attention alive and con- 
tributing a little interest to a dull subject. Above 
all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, 
and must use the contagion of his own example. 

But, when all is said and done, the fact remains 
that some teachers have a naturally inspiring pres- 
ence, and can make their exercises interesting, 
while others simply cannot. And psychology and 
general pedagogy here confess their failure, and 



106 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

hand things over to the deeper springs of human 
personality to conduct the task. 

A brief reference to the physiological theory of 
the attentive process may serve still further to 
elucidate these practical remarks, and confirm 
them by showing them from a slightly different 
point of view. 

What is the attentive process, psychologically 
considered? Attention to an object is what takes 
place whenever that object most completely oc- 
cupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose 
the object be an object of sensation, — a figure 
approaching us at a distance on the road. It is 
far off, barely perceptible, and hardly moving: we 
do not know with certainty whether it is a man 
or not. Such an object as this, if carelessly looked 
at, may hardly catch our attention at all. The opti- 
cal impression may affect solely the marginal con- 
sciousness, while the mental focus keeps engaged 
with rival things. We may indeed not 'see' it 
till some one points it out. But, if so, how does 
he point it out? By his finger, and by describing 
its appearance, — by creating a premonitory image 
of where to look and of what to expect to see. 
This premonitory image is already an excitement 



ATTENTION, PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED 107 

of the same nerve-centres that are to be concerned 
with the impression. The impression comes, and 
excites them still further ; and now the object en- 
ters the focus of the field, consciousness being sus- 
tained both by impression and by preliminary idea. 
But the maximum of attention to it is not yet 
reached. Although we see it, we may not care 
for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; 
and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may 
quickly take our mind away. If, however, our 
companion defines it in a significant way, arouses 
in the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended 
from it, — names it an enemy or as a messenger 
of important tidings, — the residual and marginal 
ideas now aroused, so far from being its rivals, 
become its associates and allies. They shoot to- 
gether into one system with it; they converge 
upon it; they keep it steadily in focus; the mind 
attends to it with maximum power. 

The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum 
may be physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell 
played on in two ways, from without and from 
within. Incoming currents from the periphery 
arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres 
of memory and imagination re-enforce these. 

In this process the incoming impression is the 



108 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

newer element ; the ideas which re-enforce and sus- 
tain it are among the older possessions of the 
mind. And the maximum of attention may then 
be said to be found whenever we have a systema- 
tic harmony or unification between the novel and 
the old. It is an odd circumstance that neither 
the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting: the 
absolutely old is insipid ; the absolutely new 
makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is 
what claims the attention, — the old with a slightly 
new turn. No one wants to hear a lecture on a 
subject completely disconnected with his previous 
knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of 
which we know a little already, just as, in the 
fashions, every year must bring its slight modifi- 
cation of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from 
the fashion of one decade into another would be 
distasteful to the eye. 

The genius of the interesting teacher consists 
in sympathetic divination of the sort of material 
with which the pupil's mind is likely to be already 
spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which 
discovers paths of connection from that material 
to the matters to be newly learned. The principle 
is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is 
difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of 



INTEREST AND EFFORT ARE COMPATIBLES 109 

such psychology as this which I am recalling can 
no more make a good teacher than a knowledge 
of the laws of perspective can make a landscape 
painter of effective skill. 

A certain doubt may now occur to some of 
you. A while ago, apropos of the pugnacious 
instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being 
possibly too 'soft.' You may perhaps here face 
me with my own words, and ask whether the 
exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the 
pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid 
the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to 
repulsive work, does not savor also of sentimen- 
talism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you 
say, must, in the nature of things, always be repul- 
sive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good 
part of life's work. Why seek to ehminate it 
from the schoolroom or minimize the sterner law ? 

A word or two will obviate what might perhaps 
become a serious misunderstanding here. 

It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it 
has become habitual and automatic, is repulsive, 
and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking 
back the attention to it every now and then. 
This is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will. 



110 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects 
and of the learning mind. The repulsive proc- 
esses of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps 
of mathematical identity, and the like, must 
borrow their interest at first from purely external 
sources, mainly from the personal interests with 
which success in mastering them is associated, 
such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not 
being beaten by a difficulty and the like. With- 
out such borrowed interest, the child could not 
attend to them at all. But in these processes 
what becomes interesting enough to be attended 
to is not thereby attended to without effort. 
Effort always has to go on, derived interest, for 
the most part, not awakening attention that is 
easy, however spontaneous it may now have to be 
called. The interest which the teacher, by his 
utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over 
and over again to be only an interest sufficient to 
let loose the effort. The teacher, therefore, need 
never concern himself about inventing occasions 
where effort must be called into play. Let him 
still awaken whatever sources of interest in the 
subject he can by stirring up connections between 
it and the pupil's nature, whether in the line of 
theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of pug- 



INTEREST AND EFFORT AEE COMPATIBLES 111 

nacious impulse. The laws of mind will then 
bring enough pulses of effort into play to keep the 
pupil exercised in the direction of the subject. 
There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than 
the steady struggle to attend to immediately re- 
pulsive or difficult objects of thought which have 
grown to interest us through their association as 
means, with some remote ideal end. 

The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, 
therefore, in principle to be reproached with mak- 
ing pedagogy soft. If it do so, it is because it is 
unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for the 
mere sake of discipline, command attention from 
your pupils in thundering tones. Do not too 
often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as 
a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preach- 
ing the importance of the subject. Sometimes, 
indeed, you must do these things; but, the more 
you have to do them, the less skilful teacher you 
will show yourself to be. Elicit interest from 
within, by the warmth with which you care for 
the topic yourself, and by following the laws I 
have laid down. 

If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature 
by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace 
some point of analogy in it with the known. If 



112 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. 
If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some 
prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make 
sure that it shall run through certain inner 
changes, since no unvarying object can possibly 
hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil 
wander from one aspect to another of your sub- 
ject, if you do not wish him to wander from it 
altogether to something else, variety in unity be- 
ing the secret of all interesting talk and thought. 
The relation of all these things to the native 
genius of the instructor is too obvious to need 
comment again. 

One more point, and I am done with the subject 
of attention. There is unquestionably a great 
native variety among individuals in the type of 
their attention. Some of us are naturally scatter- 
brained, and others follow easily a train of con- 
nected thoughts without temptation to swerve 
aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on 
a difference between individuals in the type of 
their field of consciousness. In some persons this 
is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal 
ideas predominate in determining association. In 
others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, 



CAN M1NIKWANDEB1NG BH OUEED 113 

and to be filled with something like meteoric 
showers of images, which strike into it at random, 
displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association 
in their own direction. Persons of the latter type 
find their attention wandering every minute, and 
must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The 
others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, 
and, when interrupted, are 'lost* for a moment 
before they come back to th? outer world. 

The possession of such ^ steady faculty of at- 
tention is unquestionably a great boon. Those 
who have it can work more rapidly, and with less 
nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think 
that no one who is without it naturally can by 
any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a very 
high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed char- 
acteristic of the individual But I wish to make 
a remark here which I shall have occasion to 
make again in other connections. It is that no 
one need deplore unduly the inferiority in himself 
of any one elementary faculty. This concentrated 
type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is 
one of the things that might be ascertained and 
measured by exercises in the laboratory. But, 
having ascertained it in a number of f arsons, we 
could never rank them in a scale of actual and 



114 TALKS TO TBACHEKS 

practical mental efficiency based on its degrees 
The total mental efficiency of a man is the result- 
ant of the working together of all his faculties. 
He is too complex a being for any one of them to 
have the casting vote. If any one of them do 
have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the 
strength of his desire and passion, the strength of 
the interest he takes in what is proposed. Con- 
centration, memory, reasoning power, inventive- 
ness, excellence of the senses,-— all are subsidiary 
to this. No matter how scatter-brained the type 
of a man's successive fields of consciousness may 
be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to 
it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and 
first and last do more with it, and get more results 
from it, than another person whose attention may 
be more continuous during a given interval, but 
whose passion for the subject is of a more languid 
and less permanent sort. Some of the most effi- 
cient workers I know are of the ultra-scatter- 
brained type. One friend, who does a prodigious 
quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, 
if he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits 
down to work at something else, his best results 
coming through his mind-wanderings. This is 
perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on his part i 



ATTENTION, CONCLUDED 115 

but I seriously think that no one of us need be too 
much distressed at his own shortcomings in this 
regard. Our mind may enjoy but little comfort, 
may be restless and feci confused ; but it may be 
ex tremely efficient all the same 



XII. 
MEMORY 

Wi are following a somewhat arbitrary order. 
Since each and every faculty we possess is either 
in whole or in part a resultant of the play of our 
associations, it would have been as natural, after 
treating of association, to treat of memory as to 
treat of interest and attention next But, since 
we did take the latter operations first, we must 
take memory now without farther delay ; for the 
phenomena of memory are among the simplest 
and most immediate consequences of the fact that 
our mind is essentially an associating machine. 
There is no more pre-eminent example for exhib- 
iting the fertility of the laws of association as 
principles of psychological analysis. Memory, 
moreover, is so important a faculty in the school- 
room that you are probably waiting with some 
sagerness to know what psychology has to say 
about it for your help. 

In old times, if you asked a person to explain 
why he came to be remembering at that moment 



SHALL WE CALL MEMORY A FACULTY 117 

some particular incident in his previous life, the 
only reply he could make was that his soul is 
endowed with a faculty called memory ; that it is 
the inalienable function of this faculty to recol- 
lect ; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that 
moment must have a cognition of that portion of 
the past. This explanation by a 'faculty' is one \ 

thing which explanation by association has super- \ 

seded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty 
of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact 
that we can remember, nothing more than an 
abstract name for our power inwardly to recall 
the past, there is no harm done : we do have the 
faculty ; for we unquestionably have such a power. 
But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of expla- 
nation of our general power to recall, your psychol- 
ogy is empty. The associationist psychology, on 
the other hand, gives an explanation of each par- 
ticular fact of recollection; and, in so doing, it 
also gives an explanation of the general faculty. 
The 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ulti- 
mate explanation ; for it is itself explained as a 
result of the association of ideas. 

Nothing is easier than to show you just what I 
mean by this. Suppose I am silent for a moment, 
and then say in commanding accents : " Remem- 



118 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ber! Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory 
obey the order, and reproduce any definite image 
from your past? Certainly not. It stands star- 
ing into vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a 
thing do you wish me to remember?" It needs 
in short, a cue. But, if I say, remember the date 
of your birth, or remember what you had for 
breakfast, or remember the succession of notes in 
the musical scale; then your faculty of memory im- 
mediately produces the required result: the 'cue' 
determines its vast set of potentialities toward a 
particular point. And if you now look to see how 
this happens, you immediately perceive that the 
cue is something contiguously associated with the 
thing recalled. The words, 'date of my birth/ 
have an ingrained association with a particular 
number, month, and year; the words, ' breakfast 
this morning/ cut off all other lines of recall ex- 
cept those which lead to coffee and bacon and 
eggs; the words, ' musical scale/ are inveterate 
mental neighbors of do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The 
laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains 
of our thinking which are not interrupted by sen- 
sations breaking on us from without. Whatever 
appears in the mind must be introduced; and, 
when introduced, it is as the associate of some- 



PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY 119 

thing already there. This is as true of what you 
are recollecting as it is of everything else you 
think of. 

Reflection will show you that there are peculi- 
arities in your memory which would be quite 
whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced 
to regard them as the product of a purely spir- 
itual faculty. Were memory such a faculty, 
granted to us solely for its practical use, we 
ought to remember easiest whatever we most 
needed to remember; and frequency of repeti- 
tion, recency, and the like, would play no part 
in the matter. That we should best remember 
frequent things and recent things, and forget 
things that are ancient or were experienced only 
once, could only be regarded as an incomprehen- 
sible anomaly on such a view. But if we remem- 
ber because of our associations, and if these are 
(as the physiological psychologists believe) due 
to our organized brain-paths, we easily see how 
the law of recency and repetition should prevail. 
Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those 
that lie most open, those which may be expected 
most easily to lead to results. The laws of our 
memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents 
of our associational constitution; and, when we 



120 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

are emancipated from the flesh, it is conceivable 
that they may no longer continue to obtain. 

We may assume, then, that recollection is a 
resultant of our associative processes, these them- 
selves in the last analysis being most probably due 
to the workings of our brain. 

Descending more particularly into the faculty 
of memory, we have to distinguish between its 
potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and 
its actual aspect as recollection now of a particu- 
lar event. Our memory contains all sorts of 
items which we do not now recall, but which we 
may recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. 
Both the general retention and the special recall 
are explained by association. An educated mem- 
ory depends on an organized system of associa- 
tions ; and its goodness depends on two of thair 
peculiarities : first, on the persistency of the asso- 
ciations ; and, second, on their number. 

Let us consider each of these points in turn. 

First, the persistency of the associations. This 
gives what may be called the quality of native 
retentiveness to the individual. If, as I think 
we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the 
organic condition by which the vestiges of our 



THE GIFT OF ORGANIC IiETENTIVENESS 121 

experience are associated with each other, we 
may suppose that some brains are * wax to receive 
and marble to retain.' The slightest impressions 
made on them abide. Names, dates, prices, an- 
ecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their 
several elements fixedly cohering together, so that 
the individual soon becomes a walking cyclopedia 
of information. All this may occur with no philo- 
sophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave 
the materials acquired into anything like a logical 
system. In the books of anecdotes, and, more re- 
cently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded 
instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of 
this desultory memory ; and they are often other- 
wise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no 
means incompatible with a philosophic mind ; for 
mental characteristics have infinite capacities for 
permutation. And, when both memory and phi- 
losophy combine together in one person, then in- 
deed we have the highest sort of intellectual 
efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, 
your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio 
copies of mankind, belong to this type. Effi- 
ciency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to 
require it. For, although your philosophic or 
systematic mind without good desultory memory 



122 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

may know how to work out results and recollect 
where in the books to find them, the time lost 
in the searching process handicaps the thinker, 
and gives to the more ready type of individual 
the economical advantage. 

The extreme of the contrasted type, the type 
with associations of small persistency, is found in 
those who have almost no desultory memory at 
all. If they are also deficient in logical and sys- 
tematizing power, we call them simply feeble in- 
tellects ; and no more need to be said about them 
here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like 
a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily 
made, but are soon closed over again, so that the 
brain reverts to its original indifferent state. 

But it may occur here, just as in other gelati- 
nous substances, that an impression will vibrate 
throughout the brain, and send waves into other 
parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the 
immediate impression may fade out quickly, it 
does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it 
makes there may remain, and become so many 
avenues through which the impression may be re- 
produced if they ever get excited again. And its 
liability to reproduction will depend of course 
upon the variety of these paths and upon the fre- 



THE SECRET OF A GOOD MEMORY 123 

quency with which they are used. Each path is 
in fact an associated process, the number of these 
associates becoming thus to a great degree a sub- 
stitute for the independent tenacity of the original 
impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each 
of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a 
means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. 
Together they form a network of attachments by 
which it is woven into the entire tissue of our 
thought. The « secret of a good memory ' is thus 
the secret of forming diverse and multiple associa- 
tions with every fact we care to retain. But this 
forming of associations with a fact,— what is it 
but thinking about the fact as much as possible ? 
Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward 
experiences, the one who thinks over Ms experiences 
most, and weaves them into the most systematic 
relations with each other, will be the one with the 
best memory. 

But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so 
largely a matter of its associations with other 
things which thus becomes its cues, an important 
psedagogic consequence follows. There can be no 
improvement of the general or elementary faculty of 
memory : there can only be improvement of our mem- 
ory for special systems of associated things ; and 



124 TALKS TO TEACHEKS 

this latter improvement is due to the way in 
which the things in question are woven into asso- 
ciation with each other in the mind. Intricately 
or profoundly woven, they are held : disconnected, 
they tend to drop out just in proportion as the 
native brain retentiveness is poor. And no 
amount of training, drilling, repeating, and re- 
citing employed upon the matter of one system 
of objects, the history-system, for example, will 
in the least improve either the facility or the 
durability with which objects belonging to a 
wholly disparate system — the system of facts of 
chemistry, for instance — tend to be retained. 
That system must be separately worked into the 
mind by itself, — a chemical fact which is thought 
about in connection with the other chemical facts, 
tending then to stay, but otherwise easily drop- 
ping out. 

We have, then, not so much a faculty of mem- 
ory as many faculties of memory. We have as 
many as we have systems of objects habitually 
thought of in connection with each other. A given 
object is held in the memory by the associates it 
has acquired within its own system exclusively. 
Learning the facts of another system will in no 
wise help it to stay in the mind, for the simple 



MEMORIES RATHER THAN MEMORY 125 

reason that it has no * cues' within that othei 
system. 

We see examples of this on every hand. 
Most men have a good memory for facts con- 
nected with their own pursuits. A college ath- 
lete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze 
you by his knowledge of the 'records' at various 
feats and games, and prove himself a walking 
dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is 
that he is constantly going over these things in his 
mind, and comparing and making series of them. 
They form for him, not so many odd facts, but 
a concept-system, so they stick. So the merchant 
remembers prices, the politician other politicians' 
speeches and votes, with a copiousness which 
astonishes outsiders, but which the amount of 
thinking they bestow on these subjects easily 
explains. 

The great memory for facts which a Darwin or 
a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompati- 
ble with the possession on their part of a mind 
with only a middling degree of physiological re- 
tentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself 
the task of verifying such a theory as that of evo^ 
lution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him 
like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the 



126 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

theory will hold thorn fast ; and, the more of these 
the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudi- 
tion will become. Meanwhile the theorist may 
have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutiliza- 
ble facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten 
as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as ency- 
clopedic as his erudition may coexist with the 
latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices 
of its web. Those of you who have had much to 
do with scholars and savants will readily think of 
examples of the class of mind I mean. 

The best possible sort of system into which to 
weave an object, mentally, is a rational system, or 
what is called a ' science,' Place the thing in its 
pigeon-hole in a elassihcatory series; explain it 
logically by its causes, and deduce from it its 
necessary effects ; find out of what natural law it 
is an instance, — and you then know it in the best 
of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the 
greatest of labor-saving contrivances. It relieves 
the memory of mi immense number of details, re- 
placing, as it does, merely contiguous associations 
by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or anal- 
ogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge 
your memory of masses of particular instances, 
for the law will reproduce them for you whenever 



TECHNICAL MNEMONICS 127 

you require them. The law of refraction, for ex- 
ample: If you know that, you can with a pencil 
and ;i bit of paper immediately discern how a con- 
vex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must sever- 
ally alter the appearance of an object. Hut, if 
you don't know the general law, you must charge 
your memory separately with each of the three 
kinds of effect. 

A 4 philosophic ' system, in which all things 
found their rational explanation and were con- 
nected together as causes and effects, would be 
the perfect mnemonic system, in which the great- 
est economy of means would bring about the 
greatest richness of results. So that, if we have 
poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves 
by cultivating the philosophic turn of mind. 

There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, 
some public, some sold as secrets. They an; all 
so many devices for training us into certain me- 
thodical and stereotyped way* of thinking about the 
facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, 
I could not here go into these systems in any de- 
tail. But a single example, from a popular sys- 
tem, will show what I mean. I take the number- 
alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollect- 
ing numbers and dates. In this system each digit 



128 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

is represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is t or d; 
2,n; 3,ra; 4,r; 5, 1; 6, sh,J, <?A, or#; 7, c,k,g, 
or <^ ; 8, / or v ; 9, b or p ; 0, *, <?, or z. Suppose, 
now, you wish to remember the velocity of sound, 
l,i42 feet a second : i, t, r, n, are the letters you 
must use. They make the consonants of tight 
run, and it would be a 'tight run' for you to 
keep up such a speed. So 1649, the date of 
the execution of Charles I., may be remembered 
by the word sharp, which recalls the headsman's 
axe. 

Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding 
words that are appropriate in this exercise, it is 
clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly way 
of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the 
historian is much better. He has a lot of land- 
mark-dates already in his mind. He knows the 
historic concatenation of events, and can usually 
place an event at its right date in the chronology- 
table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring 
it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and 
consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by 
connecting it with theirs. The artificial memory- 
systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational 
methods of thinking, are only to be recommended 
for the first landmarks in a system, or for such 



WHY CRAMMING IS BAD 129 

purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connec- 
tion with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student 
of physics may remember the order of the spectra] 
colours by the word vibgyor which their initial 
letters make. The student of anatomy may re- 
member the position of the Mitral valve on the 
Left side of the heart by thinking that L. M. 
stands also for 4 long meter ' in the hymn-books. 

You now see why « cramming ' must be so poor 
a mode of study. Cramming seeks to stamp things 
in by intense application immediately before the 
ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but 
few associations. On the other hand, the same 
thing recurring on different days, in different con- 
texts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, 
related to other things and reviewed, gets well 
wrought into the mental structure. This is the 
reason why you should enforce on your pupils 
habits of continuous application. There is no 
moral turpitude in cramming. It would be the 
best, because the most economical, mode of study 
if it led to the results desired. But it does not, 
and your older pupils can readily be made to see 
the reason why. 

It follows also, from what has been said, that 
the popular idea that 6 the Memory, 9 in the sense of 



180 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

a general elementary faculty, can he improved by 
training, is a great mistake. Your memory for 
facts of a certain class can be improved very much 
by training in that class of facts, because the in- 
coming new fact will then find all sorts of ana- 
logues and associates already there, and these 
will keep it liable to recall. But other kinds of 
fact will reap none of that benefit, and, unless one 
have been also trained and versed in their class, 
will be at the mercy of the mere crude retentive- 
ness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is 
practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one 
often hears people say: "A great sin was com- 
mitted against me hi my youth: my teachers 
entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they 
had only made me learn a lot of things by heart 
at school, I should not be, as I am now, forgetful 
of everything I read and hear." This is a great 
mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it 
easier to learn and remember other poetry, but 
nothing else ; and so of dates ; and so of chemis- 
try and geography. 

But, after what I have said, I am sure you will 
need no farther argument on this point; and I 
therefore pass it by. 



VERBAL MEMORIZING 131 

But, since it has brought me to speak of learn- 
ing things by heart, I think that a general prac- 
tical remark about verbal memorizing may now 
not be out of place. The excesses of old-fash- 
ioned verbal memorizing, and the immense ad- 
vantages of objec1>teaching in the earlier stages 
of culture, have perhaps led those who philoso- 
phize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction ; 
and learning things by heart is now probably 
somewhat too much despised. For, when all is 
said and done, the fact remains that verbal ma- 
terial is, on the whole, the handiest and most use- 
ful material in which thinking can be carried on. 
Abstract conceptions are far and away the most 
economical instruments of thought, and abstract 
conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in 
words. Statistical inquiry would seem to show 
that, as men advance in life, they tend to make 
less and less use of visual images, and more and 
more use of words. One of the first things that 
Mr. Galton discovered was that this appeared to 
be the case with the members of the Royal Society 
whom he questioned as to their mental images. 
I should say, therefore, that constant exercise in 
verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable 
feature in all sound education. Nothing is more 



132 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort 
of mind that is reminded by everything of some 
quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now 
exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is 
more convenient to its possessor, or more delight- 
ful to his comrades, than a mind able, in telling 
a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue 
or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. 
In every branch of study there are happily turned, 
concise, and handy formulas which in an incom- 
parable way sum up results. The mind that can 
retain such formulas is in so far a superior mind, 
and the communication of them to the pupil 
ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite 



In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, 
efficient and inefficient methods ; and, by making 
the pupil skilful in the best method, the teacher 
can both interest him and abridge the task. The 
best method is of course not to c hammer in ' the 
sentences, by mere reiteration, but to analyze them, 
and think. For example, if the pupil should have 
to learn this last sentence, let hini first strip out 
its grammatical core, and learn, " The best method 
is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then add 
the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, 



•SCIENTIFIC' measurements OF MEMORY 133 

thus: "The best method is of course not to ham- 
mer in the sentences, but to analyze them and 
think" Then finally insert the words i hy mere 
reiteration? and the sentence is complete, and 
both better understood and quicker remembered 
than by a more purely mechanical method. 

In conclusion, I must say a word about the con- 
tributions to our knowledge of memory which have 
recently come from the laboratory-psychologists. 
Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-in- 
strument child-study are taking accurate measure- 
ments of children's elementary faculties, and 
among these what we may call immediate memory 
admits of easy measurement. All we need do is 
to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, 
figures, pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, 
two, three, or more seconds, or to sound a similar 
series of names at the same intervals, within his 
hearing, and then see how completely he can re- 
produce the list, either directly, or after an inter- 
val of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer 
space of time. According to the results of this 
exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory- 
scale ; and some persons go so far as to think that 
the teacher should modify her treatment of the 



134 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

child according to the strength or feebleness of 
its faculty as thus made known. 

Now I can only repeat here what I said to you 
when treating of attention : man is too complex a 
being for light to be thrown on his real efficiency 
by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart 
from its consensus in the working whole. Such 
an exercise as this, dealing with incoherent and 
insipid objects, with no logical connection with 
each other, or practical significance outside of the 
'test,' is an exercise the like of which in real 
life we are hardly ever called upon to perform. 
In real life, our memory is always used in the ser- 
vice of some interest : we remember tilings which 
we care for or which are associated with things 
we care for; and the child who stands at the bot- 
tom of the scale thus experimentally established 
might, by dint of the strength of his passion for 
a subject, and in consequence of the logical asso- 
ciation into which he weaves the actual materials 
of his experience, be a very effective memorizer 
indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much 
better than an immediate parrot who might stand 
at the top of the ' scientifically accurate ' list. 

This preponderance of interest, of passion, in 
determining the results of a human being's work- 



ELEMENTARY DEFECTS NOT FATAL 185 

ing life, obtains throughout. No elementary 
measurement, capable of being performed in a 
laboratory, can throw any light on the actual 
efficiency of the subject ; for the vital thing about 
him, his emotional and moral energy and dogged- 
ness, can be measured by no single experiment, 
and becomes known only by the total results in the 
long run. A blind man like Huber, with his pas- 
sion for bees and ants, can observe them through 
other people's eyes better than these can through 
their own. A man born with neither arms nor 
legs, like the late Kavanagh, M. P. — and what 
an icy heart his mother must have had about him 
in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the 
laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions 
have been ! — can be an adventurous traveller, an 
equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic 
outdoor life. Mr. Romanes studied the element- 
ary rate of apperception in a large number of 
persons by making them read a paragraph as fast 
as they could take it in, and then immediately 
write down all they could reproduce of its con- 
tents. He found astonishing differences in the 
rapidity, some taking four times as long as others 
to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers 
being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, 



136 TALKS TO TEACHERS 






too. But not, — and this is my point, — not the 
most intellectually capable subjects, as tested by 
the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 
* genuine ' intellectual work ; for he tried the ex- 
periment with several highly distinguished men in 
science and literature, and most of them turned 
out to be slow readers. 

In the light of all such facts one may well be- 
lieve that the total impression which a perceptive 
teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indi- 
cated by his general temper and manner, by the 
listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness 
with which his school work is done, will be of 
much more value than those unreal experimental 
tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of 
fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., 
which are urged upon us as the only basis of a 
genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measure- 
ments can give us useful information only when 
we combine them with observations made without 
brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the 
measured individual, by teachers with eyes in 
their heads and common sense, and some feeling 
for the concrete facts of human nature in their 
hearts. 

Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast 



VARIOUS TYPES OF IMAGINATION 137 

down by the discovery of his deficiency in any ele- 
mentary faculty of the mind. What tells in life 
is the whole mind working together, and the de- 
ficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated 
by the efforts of the rest. You can be an artist 
without visual images, a reader without eyes, a 
mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. 
In almost any subject your passion for the subject 
will save you. If you only care enough for a 
result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you 
wish to be rich, you will be rich ; if you wish to 
be learned, you will be learned ; if you wish to be 
good, you will be good, Only you must, then, 
really wish these things, and wish them with ex- 
clusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hun- 
dred other incompatible things just as strongly. 

One of the most important discoveries of the 
* scientific ' sort that have recently been made in 
psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others con- 
cerning the great variations among individuals in 
the type of their imagination. Every one is now 
familiar with the fact that human beings vary 
enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, defi- 
niteness, and extent of their visual images. These 
are singularly perfect in a large number of indi- 
viduals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly 



138 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

to exist. The same is true of the auditory and 
motor images, and- probably of those of every 
kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain- 
areas for the various orders of sensation would 
seem to provide a physical basis for such varia- 
tions and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are 
nowadays so popularly known that I need only 
remind you of their existence. They might 
seem at first sight of practical importance to the 
teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recom- 
mended to sort their pupils in this way, and treat 
them as the result falls out. You should inter- 
rogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or 
exhibit lists of written words to their eyes, and 
then sound similar lists in their ears, and see by 
which channel a child retains most words. Then, 
in dealing with that child, make your appeals 
predominantly through that channel. If the 
class were very small, results of some distinct- 
ness might doubtless thus be obtained by a pains- 
taking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual 
school-room no such differentiation of appeal is 
possible; and the only really useful practical 
lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology 
in the conduct of large schools is the lesson al- 
ready reached in a purely empirical way, that 






SENSE-IMPRESSIONS SHOULD BE VARIED 139 

the teacher ought always to impress the class 
through as many sensible channels as he can. 
Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit 
the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, 
exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your dia- 
grams colored differently in their different parts, 
etc. ; and out of the whole variety of impressions 
the individual child will find the most lasting 
ones for himself. In all primary school work this 
principle of multiple impressions is well recog- 
nized, so I need say no more about it here. 

This principle of multiplying channels and 
varying associations and appeals is important, 
not only for teaching pupils to remember, but 
for teaching them to understand. It runs, in 
fact, through the whole teaching art. 

One word about the unconscious and unrepro- 
ducible part of our acquisitions, and I shall have 
done with the topic of memory. 

Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investi- 
gation into the laws of memory which he per- 
formed a dozen or more years ago by the method 
of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a 
method of measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, 
which lays bare an important law of the mind. 



140 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

His method was to read over his list until he 
could repeat it once by heart unhesitatingly. 
The number of repetitions required for this was 
a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each 
particular case. Now, after having once learned a 
piece in this way, if we wait five minutes, we find 
it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhes- 
itating manner. We must read it over again to 
revive some of the syllables, which have already 
dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now 
systematically studied the number of readings- 
over which were necessary to revive the unhesi- 
tating recollection of the piece after five minutes, 
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, 
had elapsed. The number of rereadings requir- 
ed he took to be a measure of the amount of for- 
getting that had occurred in the elapsed interval. 
And he found some remarkable facts. The proc- 
ess of forgetting, namely, is vastly more rapid 
at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece 
seems to be forgotten within the first half-hour, 
two-thirds of it are forgotten at the end of eight 
hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. 
He made no trials beyond one month of interval ; 
but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of 
remembrance, whose beginning his experiments 



THE RATE OF EOBGETTING 141 

thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no 
matter how long a time might elapse, the curve 
would never descend quite so low as to touch the 
zero-line. In other words, no matter how long 
ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter 
how complete our inability to reproduce it now 
may be, yet the first learning will still show its 
lingering effects in the abridgment of the time 
required for learning it again. In short, Profes- 
sor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things 
which we are quite unable definitely to recall have 
nevertheless impressed themselves, in some way, 
upon the structure of the mind. We are different 
for having once learned them. The resistances 
in our systems of brain-paths are altered. Our ap- 
prehensions are quickened. Our conclusions from 
certain premises are probably not just what they 
would be if those modifications were not there. 
The latter influence the whole margin of our con- 
sciousness, even though their products, not being 
distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at 
the focus of the field. 

The teacher should draw a lesson from these 
facts. We are all too apt to measure the gains of 
our pupils by their proficiency in directly repro- 
ducing in a recitation or an examination such 



142 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

matters as they may have learned, and inarticu- 
late power in them is something of which we 
always underestimate the value. The boy who 
tells us, " I know the answer, but I can't say what 
it is," we treat as practically identical with him 
who knows absolutely nothing about the answer 
at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a 
small part of our experience in life that we are 
ever able articulately to recall. And yet the 
whole of it has had its influence in shaping our 
character and defining our tendencies to judge 
and act. Although the ready memory is a great 
blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a 
subject, of having once had to do with it, of its 
neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover 
it again, constitutes in most men and women the 
chief fruit of their education. This is true even 
in professional education. The doctor, the lawyer, 
are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. 
They differ from other men only through the fact 
that they know how to get at the materials for 
decision in five minutes or half an hour : whereas 
the laynian is unable to get at the materials at all, 
not knowing in what books and indexes to look or 
not understanding the technical terms. 

Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type 



THE FORGOTTEN MAY STILL COUNT 143 

of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. 
It may, in the long examination which life sets 
us, come out in the end in better shape than 
the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being 
deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining 
power less commonplace, and its total mental 
output consequently more important. 

Such are the chief points which it has seemed 
worth while for me to call to your notice under 
the head of memory. "We can sum them up for 
practical purposes by saying that the art of re- 
membering is the art of thinking ; and by adding, 
with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a new 
thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our 
conscious effort should not be so much to im- 
press and retain it as to connect it with some- 
thing else already there. The connecting is the 
thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the con- 
nection, the connected thing will certainly be 
likely to remain within recall. 

I shall next ask you to consider the process by 
which we acquire new knowledge, — the process of 
4 Apperception,' as it is called, by which we re- 
ceive and deal with new experiences, and revise 
our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved 
conceptions. 



XIII. 

THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS 

The images of our past experiences, of what- 
ever nature they may be, visual or verbal, blurred 
and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or concrete, 
need not be memory images, in the strict sense of 
the word. That is, they need not rise before the 
mind in a marginal fringe or context of concomi- 
tant circumstances, which mean for us their date. 
They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures 
of an object, or of its type or class. In this un- 
dated condition, we call them products of 'im- 
agination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the 
term commonly used where the object represent- 
ed is thought of as an individual thing. Concep- 
tion is the term where we think of it as a type or 
class. For our present purpose the distinction 
is not important ; and I will permit myself to use 
either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer 
word ' idea,' to designate the inner objects of con- 
templation, whether these be individual things, 
like ' the sun ' or ' Julius Csesar,' or classes of 



THE STOCK OF IDEAS 145 

things, like « animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely 
abstract attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rect- 
itude.' 

The result of our education is to fill the mind 
little by little, as experiences accrete, with a stock 
of such ideas. In the illustration I used at our 
first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and 
getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first experi- 
ence answered to so many ideas which he acquired 
thereby, — ideas that remained with him associ- 
ated in a certain order, and from the last one of 
which the child eventually proceeded to act. The 
sciences of grammar and of logic are little more 
than attempts methodically to classify all such 
acquired ideas and to trace certain laws of relation- 
ship among them. The forms of relation between 
them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the 
mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and 
more abstract order, as when we speak of a ' syl- 
logistic relation' between propositions, or of four 
quantities making a ' proportion,' or of the « incon- 
sistency ' of two conceptions, or the « implication ' 
of one in the other. 

So you see that the process of education, taken 
in a large way, may be described as nothing but 
the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, 



146 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

the best educated mind being the mind which 
has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the 
largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. 
The lack of education means only the failure tc> 
have acquired them, and the consequent liability 
to be * floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes 
of experience. 

In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a 
certain instinctive order is followed. There is a 
native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of con- 
ception at one age, and other kinds of conception 
at a later age. During the first seven or eight 
years of childhood the mind is most interested 
in the sensible properties of material things. 
Constructiveness is the instinct most active; and 
by the incessant hammering and sawing, and 
dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things 
together and taking them apart, the child not 
only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but 
accumulates a store of physical conceptions which 
are the basis of his knowledge of the material 
world through life. Object-teaching and manual 
training wisely extend the sphere of this order 
of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the vari- 
ous kinds of tools are made to contribute to the 
store. A youth brought up with a sufficiently 



IDEAS OF PHYSICAL THINGS 147 

broad basis of this kind is always at home in the 
world. He stands within the pale. He is ac- 
quainted with Nature, and Nature in a certain 
sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the 
youth brought up alone at home, with no ac- 
quaintance with anything but the printed page, 
is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from 
the naterial facts of life, and a correlative inse- 
curity of consciousness which make of him a kind 
of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel 
himself perfectly at home. 

I already said something of this in speaking 
of the constructive impulse, and I must not re- 
peat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am 
sure, how important for life, — for the moral 
tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pur- 
suits, — is this sense of readiness for emergencies 
which a man gains through early familiarity and 
acquaintance with the world of material things. 
To have grown up on a farm, to have haunted 
a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have 
handled horses and cows and boats and guns, and 
to have ideas and abilities connected with such 
objects are an inestimable part of youthful ac- 
quisition. After adolescence it is rare to be able 
to get into familiar touch with any of these 



148 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

primitive things. The instinctive propensions 
have faded, and the habits are hard to acquire. 

Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the ' child- 
study ' movement has been to reinstate all these 
activities to their proper place in a sound system 
of education. Feed the growing human being, 
feed him with the sort of experience for which from 
year to }^ear he shows a natural craving, and he 
will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental 
tissue, even though he may seem to be ' wasting ' 
a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of 
those for whom the only channels of learning are 
books and verbally communicated information. 

It is not till adolescence is reached that the 
mind grows able to take in the more abstract as- 
pects of experience, the hidden similarities and 
distinctions between things, and especially their 
causal sequences. Rational knowledge of such 
things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, and 
biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of 
conceptions of this order form the next phase of 
education. Later still, not till adolescence is well 
advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic 
interest in abstract human relations — moral rela- 
tions, properly so called, — to sociological ideas 
and to metaphysical abstractions. 



NATURAL ORDER OF ACQUISITION 149 

This general order of sequence is followed tra- 
ditionally of course in the schoolroom. It is for- 
eign to my purpose to do more than indicate that 
general psychological principle of the successive 
order of awakening of the faculties on which the 
whole thing rests. I have spoken of it already, 
apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as 
many a youth has to go permanently without an 
adequate stock of conceptions of a certain order, 
because experiences of that order were not yielded 
at the time when new curiosity was most acute, 
so it will conversely happen that many another 
youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study 
(although he would have enjoved it well if led 
into it at a later age) through having had it 
thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was 
created, and the bloom quite taken off from future 
trials. I think I have seen college students un- 
fitted forever for * philosophy ' from having taken 
that study up a year too soon. 

In all these later studies, verbal material is the 
vehicle by which the mind thinks. The abstract 
conceptions of physics and sociology may, it is 
true, be embodied in visual or other images of 
phenomena, but they need not be so; and the 
truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, 



150 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

"words, words, words," must constitute a large 
part, and an always larger part as life advances, 
of what the human being has to learn. This is 
so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are 
causal and rational, and not merely confined to 
description. So I go back to what I said awhile 
ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more ac- 
curately words are learned, the better, if only the 
teacher make sure that what they signify is also 
understood. It is the failure of this latter condi- 
tion, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, 
that has caused that reaction against « parrot-like 
reproduction ' that we are so familiar with to-day. 
A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to 
examine a young class in geography. Glancing 
at the book, she said : " Suppose you should dig a 
hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how 
should you find it at the bottom, — warmer or 
colder than on top ? " None of the class replying, 
the teacher said : " I'm sure they know, but I think 
you don't ask the question quite rightly. Let me 
try." So, taking the book, she asked : " In what 
condition is the interior of the globe?" and re- 
ceived the immediate answer from half the class at 
once : " The interior of the globe is in a condition 
of igneous fusion" Better exclusive object-teach- 



EACH AGE CAN APPREHEND ABSTRACTIONS 151 

ing than such verbal recitations as that ; and yet 
verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with 
more objective work, must always play a leading, 
and surely the leading, part in education. Our 
modern reformers, in their books, write too ex- 
clusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These 
lend themselves better to explicit treatment ; and 
I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native 
impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and 
all that, have paid my tribute to the line of 
least resistance in describing. Yet away back in 
childhood we find the beginnings of purely intel- 
lectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract 
terms. The object-teaching is mainly to launch 
the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the 
facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas. 

To hear some authorities on teaching, however, 
you would suppose that geography not only began, 
but ended with the school-yard and neighboring 
hill, that physics was one endless round of repeat- 
ing the same sort of tedious weighing and meas- 
uring operation: whereas a very few examples 
are usually sufficient to set the imagination free 
on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves 
is more rapid, general, and abstract treatment. I 
heard a lady say that she had taken her child to 



152 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he 
saw through it immediately." Too many school 
children * see ' as immediately ' through ' the 
namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy 
to lubricate things for them, and make them in- 
teresting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, pro- 
vided they be of the proper order ; and it is a poor 
compliment to their rational appetite to think that 
anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies 
are the only kind of things their minds can digest. 
But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more 
or less ; and, in the last resort, the teacher's own 
tact is the only thing that can bring out the right 
effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is 
that of knowing just what meaning the pupil at- 
taches to the terms he uses. The words may 
sound all right, but the meaning remains the 
child's own secret. So varied forms of words 
must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And 
a strange secret does it often prove. A relative 
of mine was trying to explain to a little girl what 
was meant by ' the passive voice ' : " Suppose 
that you kill me : you who do the killing are in 
the active voice, and I, who am killed, am in 
the passive voice." "But how can you speak 
if you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, 



AMBIGUITY OF VERBAL ABSTRACTIONS 153 

you may suppose that I am not yet quite dead ! " 
The next day the child was asked, in class, to ex- 
plain the passive voice, and said, " It's the kind of 
voice you speak with when you ain't quite dead." 
In such a case as this the illustration ought to 
have been more varied. Every one's memory will 
probably furnish examples of the fantastic mean- 
ing which their childhood attached to certain 
verbal statements (in poetry often), and which 
their elders, not having any reason to suspect, 
never corrected. I remember being greatly moved 
emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of 
Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the 
staining of the heather by the blood was the evil 
chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman said, 

"I'll row you o'er the ferry. 
It is not for your silver bright, 
But for your winsome lady," 

he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, 
I recently found that one of my own children was 
reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's 
In Memoriam as 

"Ring out the food of rich and poor, 
Ring in redness to all mankind," 

and finding no inward difficulty. 



154 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

The only safeguard against this sort of miscon- 
ceiving is to insist on varied statement, and to 
bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be pos- 
sible, to some sort of practical test. 

Let us next pass to the subject of Appercep- 
tion. 






XIV. 

APPERCEPTION 

' Apperception ' is a word which cuts a great 
figure in the pedagogics of the present day. 
Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain 
text-book, which I take from an educational 
journal : — 

WHAT IS APPERCEPTION ? 

For an explanation of Apperception see 

Blank's PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. of the 

Education Series, just published. 

The difference between Perception and 
Apperception is explained for the teacher in 
the preface to Blank's PSYCHOLOGY. 

Many teachers are inquiring, " What is 
the meaning of Apperception in educational 
psychology ? " Just the book for them is 
Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea 
was first expounded. 

The most important idea in educational 
psychology is Apperception. The teacher 
may find chis expounded in Blank's PSY- 
CHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is 
making a revolution in educational methods 
in Germany. It is explained in Blank's 

PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. of the 

Education Series, just published. 

Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed 
prepaid to any address on receipt of $1.00. 



156 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a 
disgrace to all concerned ; and such talk as it 
indulges-in is the sort of thing I had in view 
when I said at our first meeting that the teachers 
were suffering at the present day from a certain 
industrious mystification on the part of editors 
and publishers. Perhaps the word 'appercep- 
tion' nourished in their eyes and ears as it 
nowadays often is, embodies as much of this 
mystification as any other single thing. The 
conscientious young teacher is led to believe that 
it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by 
losing the true inwardness of which her whole 
career may be shattered. And yet, when she 
turns to the books and reads about it, it seems 
so trivial and commonplace a matter, — meaning 
nothing more than the manner in which we re- 
ceive a thing into our minds, — that she fears she 
must have missed the point through the shallow- 
ness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter 
afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of 
stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at 
being so inadequate to her mission. 

Now apperception is an extremely useful word 
in pedagogics, and offers a convenient name for a 
process to which every teacher must frequently 



APPERCEPTION DEFINED 157 

refer. But it verily means nothing more than the 
act of taking a thing into the mind. It corre- 
sponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in psy- 
chology, being only one of the innumerable re- 
sults of the psychological process of association of 
ideas; and psychology itself can easily dispense 
with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics. 

The gist of the matter is this : Every impression 
that comes in from without, be it a sentence which 
we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which 
assails our nose, no sooner enters our conscious- 
ness than it is drafted off in some determinate direc- 
tion or other, making connection with the other 
materials already there, and finally producing what 
we call our reaction. The particular connections 
it strikes into are determined by our past experi- 
ences and the * associations ' of the present sort 
of impression with them. If, for instance, you 
hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you 
will react on the impression by inwardly or out- 
wardly articulating D, E, F. The impression 
arouses its old associates: they go out to meet it; 
it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 
* the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the fate of 
every impression thus to fall into a mind pre- 



158 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

occupied with memories, ideas, and interests, and 
by these it is taken in. Educated as we already 
are, we never get an experience that remains for 
us completely nondescript: it always reminds of 
something similar in quality, or of some context 
that might have surrounded it before, and which 
it now in some way suggests. This mental escort 
which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, 
from the mind 's ready-made stock. We conceive 
the impression in some definite way. We dispose 
of it according to our acquired possibilities, be 
they few or many, in the way of * ideas.' This 
way of taking in the object is the process of ap- 
perception. The conceptions which meet and 
assimilate it are called by Herbart the 'apperceiv- 
ing mass.' The apperceived impression is en- 
gulfed in this, and the result is a new field of 
consciousness, of which one part (and often a very 
small part) comes from the outer world, and 
another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes 
from the previous contents of the mind. 

I think that you see plainly enough now that 
the process of apperception is what I called it a 
moment ago, a resultant of the association of 
ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new 
with the old, in which it is often impossible to 



THE LAW OF LEAST DISTURBANCE 159 

distinguish the share of the two factors. For 
example, when we listen to a person speaking or 
read a page of print, much of what we think we 
see or hear is supplied from our memory. We 
overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, 
though we see the wrong ones ; and how little we 
actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize 
when we go to a foreign theatre ; for there what 
troubles us is not so much that we cannot under- 
stand what the actors say as that we cannot hear 
their words. The fact is that we hear quite as 
little under similar conditions at home, only our 
mind, being fuller of English verbal associations, 
supplies the requisite material for comprehension 
upon a much slighter auditory hint. 

In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, 
a certain general law makes itself felt, — the law 
of economy. In admitting a new body of expe- 
rience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little 
as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We 
always try to name a new experience in some 
way which will assimilate it to what we already 
know. We hate anything absolutely new, any- 
thing without any name, and for which a new 
name must be forged. So we take the nearest 
name, even though it be inappropriate. A child 



160 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

will call snow, when he sees it for the first time, 
sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he 
calls a curtain ; an egg in its shell, seen for the 
first time, he calls a pretty potato ; an orange, a 
ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. 
Caspar Hauser called the first geese he saw 
horses, and the Polynesians called Captain Cook's 
horses pigs. Mr. Hooper has written a little book 
on apperception, to which he gives the title of 
" A Pot of Green Feathers," that being the name 
applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never 
seen ferns before. 

In later life this economical tendency to leave 
the old undisturbed leads to what we know as 
'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which 
would entail extensive rearrangement of the pre- 
vious system of beliefs is always ignored or ex- 
truded from the mind in case it cannot be sophis- 
tically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously 
with the system. We have all conducted discus- 
sions with middle-aged people, overpowered them 
with our reasons, forced them to admit our con- 
tention, and a week later found them back as 
secure and constant in their old opinion as if they 
had never conversed with us at all. We call them 
old fogies ; but there are young fogies, too. Old 



NUMBERLESS TYPES OF APPERCEPTION 161 

fogyism begins at a younger age than we think. 
I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that 
in the majority of human beings it begins at 
about twenty-five. 

In some of the books we find the various forms 
of apperception codified, and their subdivisions 
numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way 
so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book 
which I remember reading there were sixteen dif- 
ferent types of apperception discriminated from 
each other. There was associative apperception, 
subsumptive apperception, assimixative appercep- 
tion, and others up to sixteen. It is needless to 
say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the 
crass artificiality which has always haunted psy- 
chology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering 
along, especially in these works which are adver- 
tised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The 
flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels 
suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, 
and chopped up into supposed ' processes ' with 
long Gree& and Latin names, which in real life 
have no distinct existence. 

There is no reason, if we are classing the dif- 
ferent types of apperception, why we should stop 
at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred. There 



162 TALKS TO TEACHEKS 

are as many types of apperception as there are pos- 
sible ways in which an incoming experience may 
be reacted on by an individual mind. A little 
while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest of a lady 
who, a fortnight before, had taken her seven-year- 
old boy for the first time to Niagara Falls. The 
child silently glared at the phenomenon until his 
mother, supposing him struck speechless by its 
sublimity, said, "Well, my boy, what do you 
think of it?" to which, "Is that the kind of 
spray I spray my nose with?" was the boy's only 
reply. That was his mode of apperceiving the 
spectacle. You may claim this as a particular 
type, and call it by the Greek name of rhinothera- 
peutical apperception, if you like ; and, if you do, 
you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than 
are some of the authors of the books. 

M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives 
a good example of the different modes of apper* 
ception of the same phenomenon which are pos* 
sible at different stages of individual experience. 
A dwelling-house took fire, and an infant in the 
family, witnessing the conflagration from the 
arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed 
nothing but the liveliest delight at its brilliancy. 
But, when the bell of the fire-engine was heard 



TOO FEW HEADS OF CLASSIFICATION 163 

approaching, the child was thrown by the sound 
into a paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as 
you know, very alarming to young children. In 
what opposite ways must the child's parents have 
apperceived the burning house and the engine re- 
spectively ! 

The self-same person, according to the line of 
thought he may be in, or to his emotional mood, 
will apperceive the same impression quite dif- 
ferently on different oocasions. A medical or en- 
gineering expert retained on one side of a case 
will not apperceive the facts in the same way as 
if the other side had retained him. When people 
are at loggerheads about the interpretation of a 
fact, it usually shows that they have too few heads 
of classification to apperceive by; for, as a gen- 
eral thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough 
to show that neither one of their rival interpreta- 
tions is a perfect fit. Both sides deal with the 
matter by approximation, squeezing it under the 
handiest or least disturbing conception: whereas 
it would, nine times out of ten, be better to en- 
large their stock of ideas or invent some altogether 
new title for the phenomenon. 

Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable 
discussion as to whether certain single-celled or- 



164 TALKS TO TEACHEES 






ganisms were animals or vegetables, until Haeckel 
introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, 
which ended the disputes. In law courts no 
tertium quid is recognized between insanity and 
sanity. If sane, a man is punished: if insane, 
acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two 
experts who will take opposite views of his 
case. All the while, nature is more subtle than 
our doctors. Just as a room is neither dark nor 
light absolutely, but might be dark for a watch- 
maker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or 
play in, so a man may be sane for some purposes 
and insane for others, — sane enough to be left at 
large, yet not sane enough to take care of his 
financial affairs. The word i crank,' which be- 
came familiar at the time of Guiteau's trial, ful- 
filled the need of a tertium quid. The foreign 
terms 4 desequilibre,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 
1 psychopathic ' subject, have arisen in response 
to the same need. 

The whole progress of our sciences goes on by 
the invention of newly forged technical names 
whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects 
of phenomena, — phenomena which could only be 
squeezed with violence into the pigeonholes of 
the earlier stock of conceptions. As time goes 



THE APPERCEIVING IDEA 165 

on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and 
more voluminous, having to keep up with the 
ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiv- 
ing ideas. 

In this gradual process of interaction between 
the new and the old, not only is the new modified 
and determined by the particular sort of old 
which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, 
the old itself, is modified by the particular kind 
of new which it assimilates. Thus, to take the 
stock German example of the child brought up in 
a house where there are no tables but square ones, 
'table' means for him a thing in which square 
corners are essential. But, if he goes to a house 
where there are round tables and still calls them 
tables, his apperceiving notion 'table' acquires 
immediately a wider inward content. In this 
way, our conceptions are constantly dropping 
characters once supposed essential, and including 
others once supposed inadmissible. The exten- 
sion of the notion ' beast ' to porpoises and whales, 
of the notion 'organism' to society, are familiar 
examples of what I mean. 

But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, 
and be our stock of them large or small, they are 
all we have to work with. If an educated man is, 



166 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

as I said, a group of organized tendencies to con- 
duct, what prompts the conduct is in every case 
the man's conception of the way in which to name 
and classify the actual emergency. The more 
adequate the stock of ideas, the more ' able ' is the 
man, the more uniformly appropriate is his be- 
havior likely to be. When later we take up the 
subject of the will, we shall see that the essential 
preliminary to every decision is the finding of the 
right names under which to class the proposed 
alternatives of conduct. He who has few names 
is in so far forth an incompetent deliberator. The 
names — and each name stands for a conception 
or idea — are our instruments for handling our 
problems and solving our dilemmas. Now, when 
we think of this, we are too apt to forget an im- 
portant fact, which is that in most human beings 
the stock of names and concepts is mostly ac- 
quired during the years of adolescence and the 
earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked 
you a moment ago by saying that most men begin 
to be old fogies at the age of twenty-five. It is 
true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well 
into middle age a great knowledge of details, and 
a great acquaintance with individual cases con- 
nected with his profession or business life. In 



OLD FOGYISM SETS IN EAKLY 167 

this sense, his conceptions increase during a very 
long period ; for his knowledge grows more exten- 
sive and minute. But the larger categories of 
conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes 
of relation between things, of which we take cog- 
nizance, are all got into the mind at a compara- 
tively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint 
themselves with the principles of a new science 
after even twenty-five. If you do not study politi- 
cal economy in college, it is a thousand to one 
that its main conceptions will remain unknown 
to you through life. Similarly with biology, 
similarly with electricity. What percentage of 
persons now fifty years old have any definite 
conception whatever of a dynamo, or how the 
trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small 
fraction of one per cent. But the boys in colleges 
are all acquiring these conceptions. 

There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, 
when young, which makes some of us draw up 
lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and 
makes most of us think that we can easily ac- 
quaint ourselves with all sorts of things which 
we are now neglecting by studying them out 
hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business 
lives. Such good intentions are hardly ever car- 



168 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

ried out. The conceptions acquired before thirty 
remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such 
exceptional cases of perpetually self-renovating 
youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by the 
admiration they awaken, the universality of the 
rule. And it may well solemnize a teacher, and 
confirm in him a healthy sense of the importance 
of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent 
upon his present ministrations in the way of im- 
parting conceptions the pupil's future life is prob- 
ably bound to be 9 



XV. 

THE WILL 

Since mentality terminates naturally in out- 
ward conduct, the final chapter in psychology has 
to be the chapter on the will. But the word 
1 will ' can be used in a broader and in a narrower 
sense. In the broader sense, it designates our 
entire capacity for impulsive and active life, 
including our instinctive reactions and those 
forms of behavior that have become secondarily 
automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent 
repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are 
such acts only as cannot be inattentively per- 
formed. A distinct idea of what they are, and 
a deliberate fiat on the mind's part, must precede 
their execution. 

Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, 
and accompanied by a feeling, altogether peculiar, 
of resolve, a feeling which may or may not carry 
with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier 
talks, I said so much of our impulsive tendencies 
that I will restrict myself in what follows to voli- 
tion in this narrower sense of the term. 



170 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

All our deeds were considered by the early 
psychologists to be due to a peculiar faculty called 
the will, without whose fiat action could not 
occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsi- 
cally inactive, were supposed to produce conduct 
only. through the intermediation of this superior 
agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to 
speak, no outward behavior could occur. This 
doctrine was long ago exploded by the discovery 
of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sen- 
sible impressions, as you know, produce movement 
immediately and of themselves. The doctrine 
may also be considered exploded as far as ideas 

The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness 
whatever, be it sensation, feeling, or idea, which 
does not directly and of itself tend to discharge 
into some motor effect. ' The motor effect need 
not always be an outward stroke of behavior. It 
may be only an alteration of the heart-beats or 
breathing, or a modification in the distribution of 
blood, such as blushing or turning pale ; or else a 
secretion of tears, or what not. But, in any case, 
it is there in some shape when any consciousness 
is there ; and a belief as fundamental as any 
in modern psychology is the belief at last attained 



IDEOMOTOR ACTION IT! 

that conscious processes of any sort, conscious 
processes merely as such, must pass over into 
motion, open or concealed. 

The least complicated case of this tendency is 
the case of a mind possessed by only a single idea. 
If that idea be of an object connected with a 
native impulse, the impulse will immediately pro- 
ceed to discharge. If it be the idea of a move- 
ment, the movement will occur. Such a case 
of action from a single idea has been distinguished 
from more complex cases by the name of ' ideo- 
motor' action, meaning action without express 
decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions 
to which we are trained are of this ideo-motor 
sort. We perceive, for instance, that the door is 
open, and we rise and shut it ; we perceive some 
raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand 
and carry one of them to our mouth without in- 
terrupting the conversation; or, when lying in 
bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for 
breakfast, and instantly we get up with no par- 
ticular exertion or resolve. All the ingrained 
procedures by which life is carried on — the man- 
ners and customs, dressing and undressing, acts 
of salutation, etc. — are executed in this semi-auto- 
matic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very 



172 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be 
concerned in them, Avhile the focus may be occu- 
pied with widely different things. 

But now turn to a more complicated case. 
Suppose two thoughts to be in the mind together, 
of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge 
itself in a certain action, but of which the other, 
B, suggests an action of a different sort, or a 
consequence of the first action calculated to make 
us shrink. The psychologists now say that the 
second idea, B, will probably arrest or inhibit the 
motor effects of the first idea, A. One word, 
then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this 
particular case more clear. 

One of the most interesting discoveries of physi- 
ology was the discovery, made simultaneously in 
France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve 
currents do not only start muscles into action, but 
may check action already going on or keep it from 
occurring as it otherwise might. Nerves of arrest 
were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves. 
The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimu- 
lated, arrests the movements of the heart: the 
splanchnic nerve arrests those of the intestines, if 
already begun. But it soon appeared that this 



THE FUNCTION OF INHIBITION 173 

was too narrow a way of looking at the matter, 
and that arrest is not so much the specific function 
of certain nerves as a general function which any 
part of the nervous system may exert upon other 
parts under the appropriate conditions. The 
higher centres, for example, seem to exert a con- 
stant inhibitive influence on the excitability of 
those below. The reflexes of an animal with its 
hemispheres wholly or in part removed become 
exaggerated. You all know that common reflex 
in dogs, whereby, if you scratch the animal's side, 
the corresponding hind leg will begin to make 
scratching movements, usually in the air. Now 
in dogs with mutilated hemispheres this scratch- 
ing reflex is so incessant that, as Goltz first de- 
scribed them, the hair gets all worn off their 
sides. In idiots, the functions of the hemispheres 
being largely in abeyance, the lower impulses, 
not inhibited, as they would be in normal human 
beings, often express themselves in most odious 
ways. You know also how any higher emotional 
tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests 
appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks 
sensuality, and the like ; and in the more subtile 
manifestations of the moral life, whenever an 
ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into inten- 



174 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

sity, it is as if the whole scale of values of our 
motives changed its equilibrium. The force of 
old temptations vanishes, and what a moment 
ago was impossible is now not only possible, but 
easy, because of their inhibition. This has been 
well called the 'expulsive power of the higher 
emotion.' 

It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to 
the case of our ideational processes. I am lying 
in bed, for example, and think it is time to get 
up ; but alongside of this thought there is present 
to my mind a realization of the extreme coldness 
of the morning and the pleasantness of the warm 
bed. In such a situation the motor consequences 
of the first idea are blocked ; and I may remain for 
half an hour or more with the two ideas oscillat- 
ing before me in a kind of deadlock, which is 
what we call the state of hesitation or delibera- 
tion. In a case like this the deliberation can be 
resolved and the decision reached in either of two 
ways : — 

(1) I may forget for a moment the thermomet- 
ric conditions, and then the idea of getting up 
will immediately discharge into act: I shall sud- 
denly find that I have got up — or 

(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, 



ANY IDEA MAY BE INHIBITOEY 176 

the thought of the duty of rising may become so 
pungent that it determines action in spite of in- 
hibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of 
energetic moral effort, and consider that I have 
done a virtuous act. 

All cases of wilful action properly so called, of 
choice after hesitation and deliberation, may be 
conceived after one of these latter patterns. So 
you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes 
place only when there are a number of conflicting 
systems of ideas, and depends on our having a 
complex field of consciousness. The interesting 
thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibi- 
tive machinery, A strong and urgent motor idea 
in the focus may be neutralized and made inopera- 
tive by the presence of the very faintest contradic- 
tory idea in the margin. For instance, I hold out 
my forefinger, and with closed eyes try to realize 
as vividly as possible that I hold a revolver in my 
hand and am pulling the trigger. I can even now 
fairly feel my finger quivering with the tendency 
to contract ; and, if it were hitched to a recording 
apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of 
tension by registering incipient movements. Yet 
it does not actually crook, and the movement of 
pulling the trigger is not performed. Why not? 



176 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Simply because, all concentrated though I am 
upon the idea of the movement, I nevertheless 
also realize the total conditions of the experiment, 
and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its 
fringe and margin, have the simultaneous idea 
that the movement is not to take place. The 
mere presence of that marginal intention, without 
effort, urgency, or emphasis, or any special rein- 
forcement from my attention, suffices to the in- 
hibitive effect* 

And this is why so few of the ideas that flit 
through our minds do, in point of fact, produce 
their motor consequences. Life would be a_ curse 
and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to 
do so. Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action 
is true; but in the concrete our fields of con- 
sciousness are always so complex that the inhibit- 
ing margin keeps the centre inoperative most of 
the time. In all this, you see, I speak as if ideas 
by their mere presence or absence determined be- 
havior, and as if between the ideas themselves on 
the one hand and the conduct on the other there 
were no room for any third intermediate principle 
of activity, like that called * the will/ 



man's conduct as a ebsultant 171 

If you are struck by the materialistic or fatal- 
istic doctrines which seem to follow this concep- 
tion, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a 
moment, as I shall soon have something more to 
say about the matter. But, meanwhile yielding 
one's self to the mechanical conception of the 
psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than 
to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character 
of human life. Man's conduct appears as the 
mere resultant of all his various impulsions and 
inhibitions. One object, by its presence, makes 
us act: another object checks our action. Feel- 
ings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway 
us one way and another: emotions complicate 
the game by their mutual inhibitive effects, the 
higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being it- 
self swept away. The life in all this becomes pru- 
dential and moral; but the psychologic agents in 
the drama may be described, you see, as nothing 
but the ' ideas ' themselves, — ideas for the whole 
system of which what we call the * soul ' or i char- 
acter' or 'will' of the person is nothing but a 
collective name. As Hume said, the ideas are 
themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the 
spectators, and the play. This is the so-called « as- 
sociationist' psychology, brought down to its rad- 



178 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 

ical expression: it is useless to ignore its power 
as a conception. Like all conceptions, when they 
become clear and lively enough, this conception 
has a strong tendency to impose itself upon be- 
lief ; and psychologists trained on biological lines 
usually adopt it as the last word of science on the 
subject. No one can have an adequate notion of 
modern psychological theory unless he has at 
some time apprehended this view in the full force 
of its simplicity. 

Let us humor it for a while, for it has advan- 
tages in the way of exposition. 

Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant 
of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhi- 
bitions. 

From this it immediately follows that there will 
be two types of will, in one of which impulsions 
will predominate, in the other inhibitions. We 
may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate 
and the obstructed will, respectively. When fully 
pronounced, they are familiar to everybody. The 
extreme example of the precipitate will is the 
maniac: his ideas discharge into action so rap- 
idly, his associative processes are so extravagantly 
lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive, and 



XKB TWO EXTREME TYPES OF WILL 1T9 

he says and does whatever pops into his head 
without a moment of hesitation. 

Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme ex- 
ample of the over-inhibited type. Their minds 
are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or helpless- 
ness, their ideas confined to the one thought that 
for them life is impossible. So they show a con- 
dition of perfect 4 abulia,' or inability to will or 
act. They cannot change their posture or speed/ 
or execute the simplest command. 

The different races of men show different tern 
peraments in this regard. The Southern races 
are commonly accounted the more impulsive and 
precipitate : the English race, especially our New 
England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied 
over with repressive forms of self-consciousness, 
and condemned to express itself through a jungle 
of scruples and checks. 

The highest form of character, however, ab- 
stractly considered, must be full of scruples and 
inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far 
from being paralyzed, will succeed in energet- 
ically keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering 
the resistances, sometimes steering along the line 
where they lie thinnest. 

Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when 



t80 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

a simultaneous contraction of the flexors guides 
and steadies them ; so the mind of him whose fields 
of consciousness are complex, and who, with the 
reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, 
and yet, instead of being palsied, acts in the way 
that takes the whole field into consideration, — 
so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind 
ihat we should seek to reproduce in our pupils. 
Purely impulsive action, or action that proceeds 
to extremities regardless of consequences, on the 
other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and 
the lowest in type. Any one can show energy, 
when made quite reckless. An Oriental despot 
requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he 
succeeds, for he has absolutely his own way ; and, 
when the world can no longer endure the horror 
of him, he is assassinated. But not to proceed 
immediately to extremities, to be still able to act 
energetically under an array of inhibitions, — that 
indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when urged 
to proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, 
saying : " Any one can govern in that way. I will 
be constitutional." Your parliamentary rulers, 
your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the strongest 
type of man, because they accomplish results 
under the most intricate possible conditions. We 



THE BALKY WILL 181 

think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a colossal monster 
of will-power, and truly enough he was so. But, 
from the point of view of the psychological ma- 
chinery, it would be hard to say whether he or 
Gladstone was the larger volitional quantity ; for 
Napoleon disregarded all the usual inhibitions, 
and Gladstone, passionate as he was, scrupulously 
considered them in his statesmanship. 

A familiar example of the paralyzing power of 
scruples is the inhibitive effect of conscientious- 
ness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversa- 
tion seem to have nourished as brilliantly as in 
France during the last century. But, if we read 
old French memoirs, we see how many brakes 
of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were 
then removed. Where mendacity, treachery, ob- 
scenity, and malignity find unhampered expression, 
talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes 
dim where the mind is stitched all over with con- 
scientious fear of violating the moral and social 
proprieties. 

The teacher often is confronted in the school, 
room with an abnormal type of will, which we 
may call the 4 balky will.' Certain children, if they 
do not succeed in doing a thing immediately, 



182 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

remain completely inhibited in regard to it : it 
becomes literally impossible for them to under- 
stand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it 
if it be an outward operation, as long as this par- 
ticular inhibited condition lasts. Such children 
are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or 
else the teacher pits his or her will against the 
child's will, considering that the latter must be 
i broken.' " Break your child's will, in order that 
it may not perish," wrote John Wesley. " Break 
its will as soon as it can speak plainly — or even 
before it can speak at all. It should be forced to 
do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten 
times running. Break its will, in order that its 
soul may live." Such will-breaking is always a 
scene with a great deal of nervous wear and tear 
on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, 
and the victory not always with the would-be 
will-breaker. 

When a situation of the kind is once fairly de- 
veloped, and the child is all tense and excited 
inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best 
for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of 
neural pathology rather than as one of moral 
culpability. So long as the inhibiting sense of 
impossibility remains in the child's mind, he will 



THE TEACHERS* IDEAL 188 

continue unable to get beyond the obstacle. The 
aim of the teacher should then be to make him 
simply forget. Drop the subject for the time, 
divert the mind to something else : then, leading 
the pupil back by some circuitous line of associa- 
tion, spring it on him again before he has time to 
recognize it, and as likely as not he will go over 
it now without any difficulty. It is in no other 
way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we 
divert his attention, do something to his nose or 
ear, lead him round in a circle, and thus get him 
over a place where flogging would only have 
made him more invincible. A tactful teacher will 
never let these strained situations come up at alL 

You perceive now, my friends, what your gen- 
eral or abstract duty is as teachers. Although 
you have to generate in your pupils a large stock 
of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet 
you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy 
or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil 
still retains his power of vigorous action. Psy* 
chology can state your problem in these terms, 
but you see how impotent she is to furnish the 
elements of its practical solution. When all is 
said and done, and your best efforts are made, it 



184 TALKS TO TEA0HEBS 

will probably remain true that the result will 
depend more on a certain native tone or temper 
in the pupil's psychological constitution than on 
anything else. Some persons appear to hare a 
naturally poor focalization of the field of con- 
sciousness; and in such persons actions hang 
slack, and inhibitions seem to exert peculiarly 
easy sway. 

But let us now close in a little more closely on 
this matter of the education of the wilL Your 
task is to build up a character in your pupils ; and 
a character, as I have so often said, consists in an 
organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what 
do such habits of reaction themselves consist? 
They consist of tendencies to act characteris- 
tically when certain ideas possess us, and to 
refrain characteristically when possessed by other 
ideas. 

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on 
what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, 
second, on the habitual coupling of the several 
ideas with action or inaction respectively. How 
is it when an alternative is presented to you for 
ehoice, and you are uncertain what you ought to 
do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. 
And in what does your deliberation consist? It 



€HAEACTER-BUILDIKG 185 

consists in trying to apperceive the case succes- 
sively by a number of different ideas, which seem 
to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one 
which seems to fit it exactly. If that be an idea 
which is a customary forerunner of action in you, 
which enters into one of your maxims of positive 
behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act im- 
mediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea 
which carries inaction as its habitual result, if it 
ally itself with prohibition, then you unhesitat- 
ingly refrain. The problem is, you see, to find 
the right idea or conception for the case. This 
search for the right conception may take days or 
weeks. 

I spoke as if the action were easy when the 
conception once is found. Often it is so, but it 
may be otherwise ; and, when it is otherwise, we 
find ourselves at the very centre of a moral sit- 
uation, into which I should now like you to look 
with me a little nearer. 

The proper conception, the true head of clas- 
sification, may be hard to attain ; or it may be one 
with which we have contracted no settled habits 
of action. Or, again, the action to which it would 
prompt may be dangerous and difficult; or else 
inaction may appear deadly cold and negative 



186 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of 
these latter cases it is hard to hold the right idea 
steadily enough before the attention to let it exert 
its adequate effects. Whether it be stimulative 
or inhibitive, it is too reasonable for us ; and the 
more instinctive passional propensity then tends 
to extrude it from our consideration. We shy 
away from the thought of it. It twinkles and 
goes out the moment it appears in the margin of 
our consciousness ; and we need a resolute effort 
*>f voluntary attention to drag it into the focus 
sf the field, and to keep it there long enough for 
its associative and motor effects to be exerted. 
Every one knows only too well how the mind 
flinches from looking at considerations hostile to 
the reigning mood of feeling. 

Once brought, however, in this way to the cen- 
tre of the field of consciousness, and held there, 
the reasonable ideawiH exert these effects inevi-* 
tably; for the laws of connection between our 
consciousness and our nervous system provide for 
the action then taking place. Our moral effort, 
properly so called, terminates in our holding fast 
to the appropriate idea. 

If, then, you are asked, " In what does a moral 
Q,ct consist when reduced to its simplest and most 



TO THINK IS THE MORAL ACT 181 

elementary form ? " you can make only one reply. 
You can say that it consists in the effort of atten- 
tion by which we hold fast to an idea which but for 
that effort of attention would be driven out of the 
mind by the other psychological tendencies that 
are there. To thinks in short, is the secret of will, 
just as it is the secret of memory. 

This comes out very clearly in the kind of 
excuse which we most frequently hear from per- 
sons who find themselves confronted by the sin- 
fulness or harmfulness of some part of their 
behavior. " I never thought" they say. " I never 
thought how mean the action was, I never thought 
of these abominable consequences." And what 
do we retort when they say this ? We say : " Why 
didnH you think ? What were you there for but 
to think ? " And we read them a moral lecture 
on their irrenectiveness. 

The hackneyed example of moral deliberation 
is the case of an habitual drunkard under tempta- 
tion. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is 
now solicited again by the bottle. His moral tri- 
umph or failure literally consists in his finding 
the right name for the case. If he says that it is 
a case of not wasting good liquor already poured 
out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable 



188 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning 
something at last about a brand of whiskey which 
he never met before, or a case of celebrating a 
public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself 
to a more energetic resolve in favor of abstinence 
than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. 
His choice of the wrong name seals his doom. 
But if, in spite of all the plausible good names 
with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes 
him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad 
name, and apperceives the case as that of " being 
a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard," 
his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He 
saves himself by thinking rightly. 

Thus are your pupils to be saved : first, by the 
stock of ideas with which you furnish them ; sec= 
ond, by the amount of voluntary attention that 
they can exert in holding to the right ones, how- 
ever unpalatable ; and, third, by the several habits 
of acting definitely on these latter to which they 
have been successfully trained. 

In all this the power of voluntarily attending 
is the point of the whole procedure. Just as a 
balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our moral 
destiny turns. You remember that, when we were 
talking of the subject of attention, we discovered 



WILL IS ATTENTION TO AN IDEAL 189 

how much more intermittent and brief our acts 
of voluntary attention are than is commonly sup- 
posed. If they were all summed together, the time 
that they occupy would cover an almost incredibly 
small portion of our lives. But I also said, you 
will remember, that their brevity was not in pro- 
portion to their significance, and that I should re- 
turn to the subject again. So I return to it now. 
It is not the mere size of a thing which constitute& 
its importance : it is its position in the organism 
to which it belongs. Our acts of voluntary atten- 
tion, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless 
momentous and critical, determining us, as they 
do, to higher or lower destinies. The exercise of 
voluntary attention in the schoolroom must there- 
fore be counted one of the most important points 
of training that take place there; and the first- 
rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter in- 
terests which he is able to awaken, will provide 
abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope 
that you appreciate this now without any further 
explanation. 

I have been accused of holding up before you, 
in the course of these talks, a mechanical and 
even a materialistic view of the mind. I have 



190 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

called it an organism and a machine. I have 
spoken of its reaction on the environment as the 
essential thing about it ; and I have referred this, 
either openly or implicitly, to the construction of 
the nervous system. I have, in consequence, re- 
ceived notes from some of you, begging me to be 
more explicit on this point ; and to let you know 
frankly whether I am a complete materialist, 
or not. 

Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly prac- 
tical and useful, and to keep free from all specu- 
lative complications. Nevertheless, I do not wish 
to leave any ambiguity about my own position ; 
and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all mis- 
understanding, that in no sense do I count myself 
a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as 
our consciousness can possibly be 'produced by a 
nervous machinery, though I can perfectly well 
see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings 
of the machinery, the order of the ideas might 
very well follow exactly the order of the ma- 
chine's operations. Our habitual associations of 
ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, 
might thus be consequences of the succession of 
currents in our nervous systems. And the pos- 
sible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would 



THE 4 FREEDOM' OF THE WILL 191 

have to ehoose from might depend exclusively on 
the native and acquired powers of his brain. If 
this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist 
conception which I sketched for you but a short 
while ago. Our ideas would be determined by 
brain currents, and these by purely mechanical 
laws. 

But, after what we have just seen, — namely, the 
part played by voluntary attention in volition, — 
a belief in free will and purely spiritual causation 
is still open to us. The duration and amount of 
this attention aeem within certain limits indeter- 
minate. We feel as if we could make it really 
more or less, and as if our free action in this re- 
gard were a genuine critical point in nature, — 
a point on which our destiny and that of others 
might hinge. The whole question of free will 
concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: 
" Is or is not the appearance of indetermination 
at this point an illusion ? " 

It is plain that such a question can be decided 
only by general analogies, and not by accurate 
observations. The free-willist believes the appear- 
ance to be a reality : the determinist believes that 
it is an illusion. I myself hold with the free-will- 
iste, — not because I cannot conceive the fatalist 



192 TALKS TO TEACHERS 

theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its 
plausibility, but simply because, if free will were 
true, it would be absurd to have the belief in it 
fatally forced on our acceptance. Considering the 
inner fitness of things, one would rather think 
that the very first act of a will endowed with 
freedom should be to sustain the belief in the 
freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my 
freedom ; I do so with the best of scientific con- 
sciences, knowing that the predetermination of 
the amount of my effort of attention can never 
receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether 
you follow my example in this respect or not, it 
will at least make you see that such psychological 
and psychophysical theories as I hold do not 
necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or 
a materialist. 

Let me say one more final word now about 
the will, and therewith conclude both that im- 
portant subject and these lectures. 

There are two types of will. There are also 
two types of inhibition. We may call them inhibi- 
tion by repression or by negation, and inhibition 
by substitution, respectively. The difference be- 
tween them is that, in the case of inhibition by 



TWO TYPES OF INHIBITION 193 

repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhi- 
biting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that 
negates it, remain along with each other in con- 
sciousness, producing a certain inward strain or 
tension there : whereas, in inhibition by substitu- 
tion, the inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the 
idea which it inhibits, and the latter quickly 
vanishes from the field. 

For instance, your pupils are wandering in 
mind, are listening to a sound outside the win- 
dow, which presently grows interesting enough 
to claim all their attention. You can call the lat- 
ter back again by bellowing at them not to listen 
to those sounds, but to keep their minds on their 
books or on what you are saying. And, by thus 
keeping them conscious that your eye is sternly 
on them, you may produce a good effect. But it 
will be a wasteful effect and an inferior effect ; for 
the moment you relax your supervision the at- 
tractive disturbance, always there soliciting their 
curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be 
just as they were before : whereas, if, without say- 
ing anything about the street disturbances, you 
open a counter-attraction by starting some very 
interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they 
will altogether forget the distracting incident, and 



194 TALKS TO TEACHEES 

without any effort follow you along. There are 
many interests that can never be inhibited by the 
way of negation. To a man in love, for example, 
it is literally impossible, by any effort of will, to 
annul his passion. But let 'some new planet swim 
into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately 
cease to engross his mind. 

It is clear that in general we ought, whenever 
we can, to employ the method of inhibition by 
substitution. He whose life is based upon the 
word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is 
wicked, and who has constantly to grapple with 
his envious and cowardly and mean propensities, 
is in an inferior situation in every respect to what 
he would be if the love of truth and magnanimity 
positively possessed him from the outset, and he 
felt no inferior temptations. Your born gentle- 
man is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more 
valuable being than your " Crump, with his grunt- 
ing resistance to his native devils," even though 
in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic 
theologians say, be rolling up great stores of 
' merit.' 

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that any- 
thing that a man can avoid under the notion that 
it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that 



SPINOZA ON SLAVES AND FREEMEN 195 

something else is good. He who habitually acts 
sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the no- 
tion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To 
him who acts habitually under the notion of good 
he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I 
beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils 
by habituating them to act, whenever possible, 
under the notion of a good. Get them habitually 
to tell the truth, not so much through showing 
them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their 
enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them 
from their native cruelty by imparting to them 
some of your own positive sympathy with an ani- 
mal's inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons 
which you may be legally obliged to conduct upon 
the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than the 
books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, 
nerves, and social miseries, and more on the bless- 
ings of having an organism kept in lifelong pos- 
session of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, 
sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics 
are unknown, and to which the morning sun and 
air and dew will daily come as sufficiently power- 
ful intoxicants. 



196 CONCLUSION 

I have now ended these talks. If to some of 
you the things I have said seem obvious or trivial, 
It is possible that they may appear less so when, 
in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves 
noticing and apperceiving events in the school- 
room a little differently, in consequence of some 
of the conceptions I have tried to make more 
clear. I cannot but think that to apperceive your 
pupil as a little sensitive, impulsive, associative, 
and reactive organism, partly fated and partly 
free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his 
ways. Understand him, then, as such a subtle 
little piece of machinery. And if, in addition, you 
can also see him sub specie bmi, and love him as 
well, you will be in the best possible position for 
becoming perfect teachers, 



TALKS TO STUDENTS 



L 

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 

I wish in the following hour to take certain 
psychological doctrines and show their practical 
applications to mental hygiene, — to the hygiene 
of our American life more particularly. Our 
people, especially in academic circles, are turn- 
ing towards psychology nowadays with great ex- 
pectations ; and, if psychology is to justify them, 
it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and 
therapeutic lines. 

The reader may possibly have heard of a pecu- 
liar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to 
in psychological literature as the Lange-James 
theory. According to this theory, our emotions 
are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are 
aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of 
the exciting object or situation. An emotion of 
fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect 
of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect 
of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion 
which the object suddenly excites ; so that, were 



200 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not 
so much feel fear as call the situation fearful ; we 
should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that 
the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusi- 
ast has even gone so far as to say that when we 
feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel 
afraid it is because we run away, and not con- 
versely. Some of you may perhaps be acquainted 
with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever 
exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of 
our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the ex- 
aggeration be very great), it is certain that the 
main core of it is true, and that the mere giving 
way to tears, for example, or to the outward ex- 
pression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment 
in making the inner grief or anger more acutely 
felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or 
more generally useful precept in the moral train- 
ing of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, 
than that which bids us pay primary attention to 
what we do and express, and not to care too much 
for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly 
impulse in time, for example, or if we only donH 
strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or 
insulting word that we shall regret as long as we 
live, our feelings themselves will presently be the 



BEFLEX-THEOKY OF EMOTION 201 

calmer and better, with no particular guidance 
from us on their own account. Action seems to 
follow feeling, but really action and feeling go 
together; and by regulating the action, which is 
under the more direct control of the will, we can 
indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. 

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerful- 
ness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to 
sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and 
to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already 
there. If such conduct does not make you soon 
feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. 
So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all 
our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very 
likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to 
feel kindly toward a person to whom we have 
been inimical, the only way is more or less de- 
liberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, 
and to force ourselves to say genial things. One 
hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a 
closer communion of heart than hours spent on 
both sides in inward wrestling with the mental 
demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with 
a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and 
keeps it still fastened in the mind : whereas, if we 
act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feel- 



202 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

ing soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently 
steals away. 

The best manuals of religious devotion accord- 
ingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our 
feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. 
In an admirable and widely successful little book 
called * The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' 
by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson 
on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you 
really have faith, no matter how cold and even 
how dubious you may feel. " It is your purpose 
God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, " not your feel- 
ings about that purpose; and your purpose, or 
will, is therefore the only thing you need attend 
to. . . . Let your emotions come or let them go, 
just as God pleases, and make no account of them 
either way. . . . They really have nothing to do 
with the matter. They are not the indicators of 
your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators 
of your temperament or of your present physical 
condition." 

But you all know these facts already, so I need 
no longer press them on your attention. From 
our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpour- 
ing currents of sensation come, which help to de- 
termine from moment to moment what our inner 



THE INNER LIFE OF INVALIDS 203 

states shall be : that is a fundamental law of psy- 
chology which I will therefore proceed to assume. 

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputa- 
tion has recently written about the Binnenleben, 
as he terms it, or buried life of human beings. 
No doctor, this writer says, can get into really 
profitable relations with a nervous patient until 
be gets some sense of what the patient's Biro- 
nenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmos- 
phere in which his consciousness dwells alone 
with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner 
personal tone is what we can't communicate or 
describe articulately to others; but the wraith 
and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our 
friends and intimates feel as our most character- 
istic Quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart 
from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked 
by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidi- 
ties, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not 
distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding 
a general self-mistrust and sense that things are 
not as they should be with him. Half the thirst 
for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply 
because alcohol acts as a temporary ansesthetic 
and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never 



204 T&L.KS TO STUDENTS 

ought to be in a human being at alL In the 
healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no 
fears or shames to discover; and the sensations 
that pour in from the organism only help to swell 
the general vital sense of security and readiness 
for anything that may turn up. 

Consider, for example, the effects of a well- 
toned motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on 
our general personal self-consciousness, the sense 
of elasticity and efficiency that results. They 
tell us that in Norway the life of the women has 
lately been entirely revolutionized by the new 
order of muscular feelings with which the use of 
the sK, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both 
sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen 
years ago the Norwegian women were even more 
than the women of other lands votaries of the 
old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic 
angel,' the • gentle and refining influence ' sort of 
thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats 
of Norway have been trained, they say, by the 
snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for 
whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, 
and who are not only saying good-bye to the tradi- 
tional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, 
but actually taking the lead in every educational 



MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 205 

and social reform. I cannot but think that the 
tennis and tramping and skating habits and the 
bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending 
among our dear sisters and daughters in this 
country are going also to lead to a sounder and 
heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic 
breath through all our American life. 

I hope that here in America more and more the 
ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will 
be maintained neck by neck with that of the well- 
trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal 
halves of the higher education for men and women 
alike. The strength of the British Empire lies in 
the strength of character of the individual Eng- 
lishman, taken all alone by himself. And that 
strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished 
and kept up by nothing so much as by the na- 
tional worship, in which all classes meet, of ath- 
letic outdoor life and sport. 

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work 
by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws 
of life and the type of future humanity. I have 
forgotten its author's name and its title, but I re- 
member well an awful prophecy that it contained 
about the future of our muscular system. Human 
perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope 



206 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

with the environment? but the environment will 
more and more require mental power from us, and 

less and less will ask for bare brute strength. 
Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy 
work, man will become more and more a mere 
director of nature's energies, and less and less an 
exerter of energy on his own account. So that, if 
the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his 
food and think, what need will he have of well- 
developed muscles at all? And why, pursued 
this writer, should we not even now be satisfied 
with a more delicate and intellectual type of 
beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? 
Nay, I have heard a fanciful friend make a still 
further advance in this 'new-man' direction. 
With our future food, he says, itself prepared 
in liquid form from the chemical elements of the 
atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in ad- 
vance, and sucked up through a glass tube from 
a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or 
stomachs even? They may go, along with our 
muscles and our physical courage, while, challeng- 
ing ever more and more our proper admiration, 
will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arch- 
ing over our spectacled eyes, and animating our 
flexible little lips to those floods of learned and 



MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 207 

ingenious talk which will constitute our most 
congenial occupation. 

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apoca- 
lyptic vision. Mine certainly did so ; and I can- 
not believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a 
superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which 
it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy 
battles against Nature, it will still always be 
needed to furnish the background of sanity, seren- 
ity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elastic- 
ity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge 
of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored 
and easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to 
be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And 
that blessed internal peace and confidence, that 
acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, 
that wells up from every part of the body of a 
muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks 
the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, 
quite apart from every consideration of its me- 
chanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of 
supreme significance. 

And now let me go a step deeper into mental 
hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sym- 
pathy in a cause which I believe is one of para- 
mount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many 



208 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, 
a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we 
should call an asylum physician (the most emi- 
nent one in Scotland), visited this country, and 
said something that has remained in my memory 
ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear 
too much expression on your faces. You are liv- 
ing like an army with all its reserves engaged in 
action. The duller countenances of the British 
population betoken a better scheme of life. They 
suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall 
back upon, if any occasion should arise that re- 
quires it. This inexcitability, this presence at 
all times of power not used, I regard," continued 
Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our 
British people. The other thing in you gives 
me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow 
to tone yourselves down. You really do carry 
too much expression, you take too intensely the 
trivial moments of life." 

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the 
secrets of the soul as expressed upon the counte- 
nance, and the observation of his which I quote 
seems to me to mean a great deal. And all 
Americans who stay in Europe long enough to 
get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and ex« 



THE OVER-EXPRESSION OF AMERICANS 209 

presses itself there, so unexcitable as compared 
with ours, make a similar observation when they 
return to their native shores. They find a wild- 
eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of 
too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too in- 
tense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to 
say whether the men or the women show it most. 
It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. 
Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, 
admire it. We say : " What intelligence it shows ! 
How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish 
eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been 
seeing in the British Isles ! " Intensity, rapidity, 
vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us some- 
thing of a nationally accepted ideal ; and the medi- 
cal notion of * irritable weakness * is not the first 
thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was 
to Dr. Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very 
long ago I remember reading a story in which, 
after describing the beauty and interest of the 
heroine's personality, the author summed up her 
charms by saying that to all who looked upon 
her an impression as of « bottled lightning' was 
irresistibly conveyed. 

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our Amer- 
ican ideals, even of a young girl's character ! Now 



210 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some 
persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the phys- 
ical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own 
family, so to speak. Besides, it may be said, and 
said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled- 
lightning temperaments in other countries, and 
plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here ; and that, 
when all is said and done, the more or less of ten- 
sion about which I am making such a fuss is a 
very small item in the sum total of a nation's life, 
and not worth solemn treatment at a time when 
agreeable rather than disagreeable things should 
be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or 
less of tension in our faces and in our unused 
muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical 
work is done by these contractions. But it is not 
always the material size of a thing that measures 
its importance : often it is its place and function. 
One of the most philosophical remarks I ever 
heard made was by an unlettered workman who 
was doing some repairs at my house many years 
ago. " There is very little difference between one 
man and another," he said, " when you go to the 
bottom of it. But what little there is, is very 
important." And the remark certainly applies 
to this case. The general over-contraction may 



THE OVER-CONTRACTED PERSON 211 

be small when estimated in foot-pounds, but its 
importance is immense on account of its effects 
on the over-contracted person's spiritual life. This 
follows as a necessary consequence from the the- 
ory of our emotions to which I made reference at 
the beginning of this article. For by the sensa- 
tions that so incessantly pour in from the over- 
tense excited body the over-tense and excited 
habit of mind is kept up ; and the sultry, threat- 
ening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere 
never quite clears away. If you never wholly 
give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but al- 
ways keep your leg- and body-muscles half con- 
tracted for a rise ; if you breathe eighteen or nine- 
teen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never 
quite breathe out at that, — what mental mood 
can you be in but one of inner panting and ex- 
pectancy, and how can the future and its worries 
possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, 
how can they gain admission to your mind if your 
brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and com- 
plete, and your muscles all relaxed ? 

Now what is the cause of this absence of re- 
pose, this bottled-hghtning quality in us Ameri- 
cans ? The explanation of it that is usually given 
is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our 



212 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

climate and the acrobatic performances of our 
thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary pro- 
gressiveness of our life, the hard work, the rail- 
road speed, the rapid success, and all the other 
things we know so well by heart. Well, our cli- 
mate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so 
than that of many parts of Europe, where never- 
theless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And 
the work done and the pace of life are as extreme 
in every great capital of Europe as they are here. 
To me both of these pretended causes are utterly 
insufficient to explain the facts. 

To explain them, we must go not to physical 
geography, but to psychology and sociology. The 
latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology 
to be developed in a manner that approaches ade- 
quacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. 
First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Bald- 
win here, have shown that invention and imita- 
tion, taken together, form, one may say, the entire 
warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is so- 
cial. The American over-tension and jerkiness 
and breathlessness and intensity and agony of ex- 
pression are primarily social, and only secondarily 
physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, 
nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, 



AMERICAN TENSION ONLY A BAD HABIT 213 

born of the imitation of bad models and the culti- 
vation of false personal ideals. How are idioms 
acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and 
accent come about? Through an accidental ex- 
ample set by some one, which struck the ears of 
others, and was quoted and copied till at last 
every one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is 
with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, 
with national manners, fashions of movement and 
gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, 
here in America, through following a succession 
of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to 
trace, and through influencing each other in a bad 
direction, have at last settled down collectively 
into what, for better or worse, is our own charac- 
teristic national type, — a type with the produc- 
tion of which, so far as these habits go, the cli- 
mate and conditions have had practically nothing 
at all to do. 

This type, which we have thus reached by our 
imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for bet- 
ter or worse, Now no type can be wholly disad- 
vantageous; but, so far as our type follows the 
bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. 
Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that 
eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not sign? 



214 TALKS TQ STUDENTS 

of strength : they are signs of weakness and of bad 
co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like 
cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for 
the moment; but they are more promising signs 
than intense expression is of what we may expect 
of their possessor in the long run. Your dull, un- 
hurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, 
because he never goes backward or breaks down. 
Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and 
has bad moods so often that you never know 
where he may be when you most need his help, 
— he may be having one of his 'bad days.' We 
say that so many of our fellow-countrymen col- 
lapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their 
nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect 
that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that 
neither the nature nor the amount of our work is 
accountable for the frequency and severity of our 
breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in 
those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, 
in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of 
feature and that solicitude for results, that lack 
of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which 
with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and 
from which a European who should do the same 
work would nine times out of ten be free. These 



AFRICAN FATIGUE 215 

perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner 
attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the 
social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and ideal- 
ized by many as the admirable way of life, are the 
last straws that break the American camel's back, 
the final overnowers of our measure of wear and 
tear and fatigue. 

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large 
number of us has a tired and plaintive sound. 
Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean 
absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring 
quality) ; but far more of us are not tired at all, or 
would not be tired at all unless we had got into a 
wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the 
prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. 
And if talking high and tired, and living excitedly 
and hurriedly, would only enable us to do more by 
the way, even while breaking us down in the end, 
it would be different. There would be some com- 
pensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the 
exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and 
easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thought- 
less most of the while of consequences, who is 
your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, 
and present and future, all mixed up together in 
our mind at once, are the °urest drags upon steady 



216 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

progress and hindrances to our success. My col- 
league, Professor Munsterberg, an excellent ob- 
server, who came here recently, has written some 
notes on America to German papers. He says in 
substance that the appearance of unusual energy 
in America is superficial and illusory, being really 
due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad 
co-ordination for which we have to thank the de- 
fective training of our people. I think myself 
that it is high time for old legends and traditional 
opinions bo be changed; and that, if any one should 
begin to write about Yankee inefficiency and fee- 
bleness, and inability to do anything with time 
except to waste it, he would have a very pretty 
paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great 
many facts to quote, and a great deal of experi- 
ence to appeal to in its proof. 

Well, my friends, if our dear American char- 
actor is weakened by all this over-tension, — and 
I think, whatever reserves you may make, that 
you will agree as to the main facts, — where does 
the remedy lie ? It lies, of course, where lay the 
origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and 
taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and 
taste must be changed. And, though it is no 
small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people 



\\K MUST IMITATE N ICW PATTERNS 1217 

witli now standards, yet, if there is to be any re- 
lief, that will have to be done. Wo must change 
ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap 
for their own Hakes, and looks down upon low 
voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the 
contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own 
Bakes lovos harmony, dignity, and ease. 

So we go back to the psychology of imitation 
again. There is only one way to improve our- 
selves, and that is by some of us setting an ex- 
ample which the others may pick np and imitate 
till the new fashion spreads from east to west. 
Some of us are in more favorable positions than 
others to set new fashions. Some are much, more 
striking personally and Imitable, so to speak. But 
no living person is sunk so low as not to be imi- 
tated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says 
of the Irish nation that there never was an Irish- 
man so poor that he didn't have; a still poorer 
Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there 
is no human being whose example doesn't work 
contagiously in some particular. The very idiots 
at our public institutions imitate each other's 
peculiarities. And, if you should individually 
achieve calmness and harmony in your own per- 
son, you may depend upon it that a wave of 



218 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

imitation will spread from you, as surely as the 
circles spread outward when a stone is dropped 
into a lake. 

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute 
pioneers. Even now in New York they have form- 
ed a society for the improvement of our nation- 
al vocalization, and one perceives its machina- 
tions already in the shape of various newspaper 
paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with 
the awful thing that it is. And, better still than 
that, because more radical and general, is the gos- 
pel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by 
Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admi- 
rable little volume called « Power through Repose,' 
a book that ought to be in the hands of every 
teacher and student in America of either sex. 
You need only be followers, then, on a path al- 
ready opened up by others. But of one thing be 
confident: others still will follow you. 

And this brings me to one more application of 
psychology to practical life, to which I will call 
attention briefly, and then close. If one's example 
of easy and calm ways is to be effectively conta- 
gious, one feels by instinct that the less volunta- 
rily one aims at getting imitated, the more uncon- 
scious one keeps in the matter, the more likely 



EGOISTIC PREOCCUPATIONS IMPEDE ACTION 219 

one is to succeed. Become the imitable thing, and 
you may then discharge your minds of all respon- 
sibility for the imitation. The laws of social na- 
ture will take care of that result. Now the psycho- 
logical principle on which this precept reposes is 
a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in 
the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a 
law which we Americans most grievously neglect. 
Stated technically, the law is this : that strong feel- 
ing about one's self tends to arrest the free associa- 
tion of one's objective ideas and motor processes. 
We get the extreme example of this in the men- 
tal disease called melancholia. 

A melancholic patient is filled through and 
through with intensely painful emotion about 
himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is 
doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind 
is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his 
own situation, and in all the books on insanity 
you may read that the usual varied flow of his 
thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, 
to use the technical phrase, are inhibited ; and his 
ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monot- 
onous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of 
the man's desperate estate. And this inhibitive 
influence is not due to the mere fact that his emo 



220 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

tion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self 
also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in 
ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one- 
idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as 
far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one 
a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow 
of thought. Ask young people returning from a 
party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what 
it was. " Oh, it was fine / it was fine ! it was fine I " 
is all the information you are likely to receive 
until the excitement has calmed down. Probably 
every one of my hearers has been made tempo- 
rarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece 
of good fortune. " G-ood! good! good!" is all 
we can at such times say to ourselves until we 
smile at our own very foolishness. 

Now from all this we can draw an extremely 
practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our 
trains of ideation and volition to be copious and 
varied and effective, we must form the habit of 
freeing them from the inhibitive influence of re- 
flection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about 
their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can 
be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, 
emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, 
have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. 



LET YOUR MACHINERY RUN FREE 221 

But confine them as far as possible to the occa- 
sions when you are making your general resolu- 
tions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and 
keep them out of the details. When once a de- 
cision is reached and execution is the order of 
the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and 
care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, 
your intellectual and practical machinery, and let 
it run free ; and the service it will do you will be 
twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 
'rattled' in the recitation-room? Those who think 
of the possibilities of failure and feel the great 
importance of the act. Who are those who do 
recite well? Often those who are most indif- 
ferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their 
memory of their own accord. Why do we hear 
the complaint so often that social life in New Eng- 
land is either less rich and expressive or more 
fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the 
world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due 
unless to the over-active conscience of the people, 
afraid of either saying something too trivial and 
obvious, or something insincere, or something un- 
worthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some 
way or other not adequate to the occasion ? How 
can conversation possibly steer itself through such 



222 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? 
On the other hand, conversation does flourish and 
society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one 
hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, 
wherever people forget their scruples and take 
the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues 
wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they 
will. 

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day 
about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every 
lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful. 
But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom 
such a general doctrine should be preached. We 
are only too careful as it is. The advice I should 
give to most teachers would be in the words of 
one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare 
yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always 
on tap : then in the class-room trust your spon- 
taneity and fling away all further care. 

My advice to students, especially to girl-stu- 
dents, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bi- 
cycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's careful- 
ness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder 
the running of one's mind. Take, for example, 
periods when there are many successive days of 
examination impending. One ounce of good nerv- 



MORAL OVER-TENSION 223 

ous tone in an examination is worth many pounds 
of anxious study for it in advance. If you want 
really to do your best in an examination, fling 
away the book the day before, say to yourself, " I 
won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, 
and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." 
Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and 
play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the 
results next day will encourage you to use the 
method permanently. I have heard this advice 
given to a student by Miss Call, whose book on 
muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In 
her later book, entitled * As a Matter of Course, 5 
the gospel of moral relaxation, of dropping things 
from the mind, and not ' caring,' is preached with 
equal success. Not only our preachers, but our 
friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various 
religious sects are also harping on this string. 
And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the vari- 
ous mind -curing sects, and such writers as Mr. 
Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, 
and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of 
schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, 
it really looks as if a good start might be made in 
the direction of changing our American mental 
habit into something more indifferent and strong. 



224 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

Worry means always and invariably inhibition 
of associations and loss of effective power. Of 
course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious 
faith; and this, of course, you also know. The 
turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the 
deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him 
who has a hold on vaster and more permanent 
realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal 
destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The 
really religious person is accordingly unshakable 
and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any 
duty that the day may bring forth. This is 
charmingly illustrated by a little work with which 
I recently became acquainted, "The Practice of 
the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of a Holy 
Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations 
and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, 
Translated from the French." * I extract a few 
passages, the conversations being given in in- 
direct discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Car- 
melite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He 
said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, 
the Treasurer, and that he was a great awkward 
fellow, who broke everything. That he had de- 
sired to be received into a monastery, thinking 

♦Fleming H. Eevell Company, New York, 



BROTHER LAWRENCE 225 

that he would there be made to smart for his awk- 
wardness and the faults he should commit, and so 
he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleas- 
ures ; but that God had disappointed him, he hav- 
ing met with nothing but satisfaction in that 
state. . • o 

" That he had long been troubled in mind from 
a certain belief that he should be damned ; that 
all the men in the world could not have per- 
suaded him to the contrary ; but that he had thus 
reasoned with himself about it : I engaged in a re~ 
ligious life only for the love of Grod, and I have en~ 
deavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of 
me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always con- 
tinue to act purely for the love of Grod. I shall 
have this good at least, that till death I shall have 
done all that is in me to love Sim. . . • That since 
then he had passed his life in perfect liberty and 
continual joy. 

"That when an occasion of practising some 
virtue offered, he addressed himself to God, say- 
ing, « Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest 
me'; and that then he received strength more 
than sufficient. That, when he had failed in his 
duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God, 
4 1 shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to 



226 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

myself; it is You who must kinder my failing, 
and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave 
himself no further uneasiness about it. 

" That he had been lately sent into Burgundy 
to buy the provision of wine for the society, which 
was a very unwelcome task for him, because he 
had no turn for business, and because he was 
lame, and could not go about the boat but by 
roiling himself over the casks. That, however, he 
gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the 
purchase of the wine. That he said to God, ' It 
was his business he was about,' and that he after- 
ward found it well performed. That he had been 
sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the 
same account ; that he could not tell how the mat- 
ter passed, but that it proved very well. 

" So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to 
which he had naturally a great aversion), having 
accustomed himself to do everything there for the 
love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, 
for his grace to do his work well, he had found 
everything easy during fifteen years that he had 
been employed there. 

" That he was very well pleased with the post 
he was now in, but that he was as ready to quit 
that as the former, since he was always pleasing 



CONCLUSION 227 

himself in every condition, by doing little things 
for the love of God, 

"That the goodness of God assured him he 
would not forsake him utterly, and that he would 
give him strength to bear whatever evil he per- 
mitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he 
feared nothing, and had no occasion to consult 
with anybody about his state. That, when he 
had attempted to do it, he had always come away 
more perplexed." 

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother 
Lawrence, and the relaxation of all unnecessary 
solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing 
spectacle® 

The need of feeling responsible all the livelong 
day has been preached long enough in our New 
England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate, 
— and long enough to the female sex. What our 
girl-students and woman-teachers most need now- 
adays is not the exacerbation, but rather the ton- 
ing-down of their moral tensions. Even now I 
fear that some one of my fair hearers may be mak- 
ing an undying resolve to become strenuously re- 
laxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her 
life. It is needless to say that that is not the way 



228 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may 
seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are 
doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of 
God, you may all at once find that you are doing 
it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, 
you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled 
to go on. 

And that something like this may be the happy 
experience of all my hearers is, in closiog, my 
most earnest wish. 






It 



ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN 
BEINGS 

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, 
big or little, depend on the feelings the things 
arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be 
precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, 
this is only because the idea is itself associated 
already with a feeling. If we were radically feel- 
ingless, and if ideas were the only things our 
mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes 
and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to 
any one situation or experience in life more valu- 
able or significant than any other. 

Now the blindness in human beings, of which 
this discourse will treat, is the blindness with 
which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings 
of creatures and people different from ourselves. 

We are practical beings, each of us with limited 
functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to 
feel intensely the importance of his own duties and 
the significance of the situations that call these 



230 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital 
secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look 
to others. The others are too much absorbed in 
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. 
Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, 
so far as they deal with the significance of alien 
lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far 
as they presume to decide in an absolute way on 
the value of other persons' conditions or ideals. 

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we 
are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this 
world ; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fond- 
ness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes 
life significant for the other ! — we to the rapture 
of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and 
lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and 
art. As you sit reading the most moving romance 
you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your 
fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good 
will toward you, the nature of your conduct is 
absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To 
sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be 
taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him 
to catch ! What queer disease is this that comes 
over you every day, of holding things and staring 
at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of 



WHAT THE BLINDNESS IS 231 

motion and vacant of all conscious life? The 
African savages came nearer the truth ; but they, 
too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly 
round one of our American travellers who, in the 
interior, had just come into possession of a stray 
copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and 
was devouring it column by column. When he 
got through, they offered him a high price for the 
mysterious object ; and, being asked for what they 
wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine," — 
that being the only reason they could conceive of 
for the protracted bath which he had given his 
eyes upon its surface. 

The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the 
root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The 
subject judged knows a part of the world of reality 
which the judging spectator fails to see, knows 
more while the spectator knows less ; and, where- 
ever there is conflict of opinion and difference of 
vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side 
is the side that feels the more, and not the side 
that feels the less. 

Let me take a personal example of the kind that 
befalls each one of us daily : — 

Some years ago, while journeying in the moun- 
tains of North Carolina, I passed by a large num- 



232 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

ber of 'coves, 9 as they call them there, or heads 
of small valleys between the hills, which had been 
newly cleared and planted. The impression on my 
mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler 
had in every case cut down the more manage- 
able trees, and left their charred stumps standing. 
The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in 
order that their foliage should not cast a shade. 
He had then built a log cabin, plastering its 
chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail 
fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the 
pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly 
planted the intervals between the stumps and 
trees with Indian corn, which grew among the 
chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and 
babes — an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some 
pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the 
sum total of his possessions. 

The forest had been destroyed; and what had 
' improved ' it out of existence was hideous, a sort 
of ulcer, without a single element of artificial 
grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. 
Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, 
scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, be- 
ginning again away back where our first ancestors 
started, and by hardly a single item the better off 



THE i COVES ' IN THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS 233 

for all the achievements of the intervening genera- 
tions. 

Talk about going back to nature! I said to 
myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove 
by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and 
for one's children ! Never thus, with nothing but 
the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the 
battle ! Never, without the best spoils of culture 
woven in ! The beauties and commodities gained 
by the centuries are sacred. They are our heri- 
tage and birthright. No modern person ought to 
be willing to live a day in such a state of rudi- 
mentariness and denudation. 

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driv- 
ing me, " What sort of people are they who have 
to make these new clearings ? " " All of us," he 
replied. " Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are 
getting one of these coves under cultivation." I 
instantly felt that I had been losing the whole in- 
ward significance of the situation. Because to me 
the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I 
thought that to those whose sturdy arms and 
obedient axes had made them they could tell 
no other story. But, when they looked on the 
hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal 
victory. The chips- the girdled trees, and the vile 



234 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and 
final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety 
for self and wife and babes. In short, the clear- 
ing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the 
retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral 
memories and sang a very psean of duty, struggle, 
and success. 

I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of 
their conditions as they certainly would also have 
been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep 
at my strange indoor academic ways of life at 
Cambridge. 

Wherever a process of life communicates an 
eagerness to him who lives it, there the life 
becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the 
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activi- 
ties, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes 
with the imagination, sometimes with reflective 
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the 
zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and 
there is 'importance' in the only real and posi- 
tive sense in which importance ever anywhere 
can be. 

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by 
a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, 



THE LANTERN BEARERS 235 

in an essay which I really think deserves to be- 
come immortal, both for the truth of its matter 
and the excellence of its form. 

"Toward the end of September," Stevenson 
writes, "when school-time was drawing near, and 
the nights were already black, we would begin to 
sally from our respective villas, each equipped 
with a tin bull's-eye- lantern. The thing was so 
well known that it had worn a rut in the com- 
merce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about 
the due time, began to garnish their windows with 
our particular brand of luminary. We wore them 
buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over 
them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned 
top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. 
They never burned aright, though they would 
always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, 
the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a 
boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for 
nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about 
their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that 
we had got the hint ; but theirs were not bull's- 
eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. 
The police carried them at their belts, and we had 
plainly copied them in that ; yet we did not pre- 
tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may 



236 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

have had some haunting thought of; and we had 
certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were 
more common, and to certain story-books in which 
we had found them to figure very largely. But 
take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was 
substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye 
under his top-coat was good enough for us. 

" When two of these asses met, there would be 
an anxious 'Have you got your lantern?' and 
a gratified « Yes ! ' That was the shibboleth, and 
very needful, too ; for, as it was the rule to keep 
our glory contained, none could recognize a lan- 
tern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. 
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly 
of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts 
above them, — for the cabin was usually locked, — 
or chose out some hollow of the links where the 
wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats 
would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes dis- 
covered; and in the chequering glimmer, under 
the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by 
a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate 
young gentlemen would crouch together in the 
cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the 
fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate 
talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some speci- 



STEVENSON QUOTED 237 

mens ! . . . But the talk was but a condiment, and 
these gatherings themselves only accidents in the 
career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this 
bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, 
the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray es- 
caping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to 
make your glory public, — a mere pillar of dark- 
ness in the dark ; and all the while, deep down in 
the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had 
a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing 
over the knowledge. 

" It is said that a poet has died young in the 
breast of the most stolid. It may be contended 
rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost 
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his 
possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility 
and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi- 
nation. His life from without may seem but a 
rude mound of mud: there will be some golden 
chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells de- 
lighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems 
to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's- 
eye at his belt. 

..." There is one fable that touches very near 
the quick of life, — the fable of the monk who 
passed into the woods, heard a bird break into 



238 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found him- 
self at his return a stranger at his convent gates ; 
for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his 
comrades there survived but one to recognize him. 
It is not only in the woods that this enchanter 
carols, though perhaps he is native there. He 
sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears 
him and chuckles, and his days are moments. 
With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling 
lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. 
All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out 
of two strands, — seeking for that bird and hearing 
him. And it is just this that makes life so hard 
to value, and the delight of each so incommu- 
nicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and 
a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which 
the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such 
wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. 
There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far 
as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap de- 
sires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed 
to remember and that which we are careless 
whether we forget ; but of the note of that time- 
devouring nightingale we hear no news. 

... "Say that we came [in such a realistic ro- 
mance] on some such business as that of my Ian- 



STEVENSON QUOTED 239 

tern-bearers on the links, and described the boys 
as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and 
drearily surrounded, all of which they were ; and 
their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly 
was. To the eye of the observer they are wet 
and cold and drearily surrounded ; but ask them- 
selves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite 
pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling 
lantern. 

u For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is 
often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a 
mere accessory, like the lantern ; it may reside in 
the mysterious inwards of psychology. ... It has 
so little bond with externals . . . that it may even 
touch them not, and the man's true life, for which 
he consents to live, lie together in the field of 
fancy. ... In such a case the poetry runs under- 
ground. The observer (poor soul, with his docu- 
ments!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is 
but to court deception. We shall see the trunk 
from which he draws his nourishment; but he 
himself is above and abroad in the green dome 
of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested 
in by nightingales. And the true realism were 
that of the poets, to climb after him like a squir- 
rel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in 



240 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

which he lives. And the true realism, always and 
everywhere, is that of the poets : to find out where 
joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. 

" For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy 
of the actors lies the sense of any action. That 
is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who 
has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon 
the links is meaningless. And hence the haunt- 
ing and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. 
... In each we miss the personal poetry, the en- 
chanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy 
that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble 
what is base ; in each, life falls dead like dough, 
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the 
colors of the sunset; each is true, each incon- 
ceivable ; for no man lives in the external truth 
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas- 
magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted 
windows and the storied wall." * 

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in 
all Stevenson. " To miss the joy is to miss all." 
Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one 
of us has some single specialized vocation of his 
own. And it seems as if energy in the service of 
its particular duties might be got only by harden- 

*' The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled « Across the Plains.' 
Abridged in the quotation. 



ROYCE QUOTED 241 

ing the heart toward everything unlike them. 
Our deadness toward all but one particular kind 
of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have 
to pay for being practical creatures. Only in 
some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or 
romancer, or when the common practical man 
becomes a lover, does the hard externality give 
way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective 
world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner 
life beyond us, so different from that of outer 
seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole 
scheme of our customary values gets confounded, 
then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly 
to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective 
must be found. 

The change is well described by my colleague, 
Josiah Royce : — 

" What, then, is our neighbor ? Thou hast re- 
garded his thought, his feeling, as somehow differ- 
ent from thine. Thou hast said, * A pain in him 
is not like a pain in me, but something far easier 
to bear.' He seems to thee a little less living 
than thou ; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire 
beside thy own burning desires. ... So, dimly and 
by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and 
hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made 



242 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

[of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with 
this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. 
Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. 
In all the songs of the forest birds ; in all the cries 
of the wounded and dying, struggling in the cap- 
tor's power ; in the boundless sea where the myr- 
iads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all 
the countless hordes of savage men ; in all sick- 
ness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, 
everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the 
same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, end- 
lessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, 
unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these 
impulses that even now throb in thine own little 
selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, 
and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst ; 
but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to 
know thy duty." * 

This higher vision of an inner significance in 
what, until then, we had realized only in the dead 
external way, often comes over a person suddenly ; 
and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his his- 
tory. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those 
moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality 

*The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged). 



OBERMANN QUOTED 243 

to them than to all other experiences. The pas- 
sion of love will shake one like an explosion, or 
some act will awaken a remorseful compunction 
that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day. 

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts 
upon us often from non-human natural things. 
I take this passage from * Obermann,' a French 
novel that had some vogue in its day: "Paris, 
March 7.— It was dark and rather cold. I was 
gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. 
I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon 
a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the 
strongest expression of desire : it was the first per- 
fume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined 
for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the 
phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. 
I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. 
I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret 
of relation it was that made me see in this flower 
a limitless beauty. ... I shall never enclose in 
a conception this power, this immensity that noth- 
ing will express ; this form that nothing will con- 
tain ; this ideal of a better world which one feels, 
but which it would seem that nature has not 
made." * 

* De S£nancour : Obermann, Lettre XXX . 



244 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of 
this sense of a limitless significance in natural 
things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat aus 
tere and moral significance,—- a 'lonely cheer.* 

45 To every natural form, rock, fruit* or flower, 
Even the loose stones that cover the highway, 
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel 
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass 
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all 
That I beheld respired with inward meaning."* 

"Authentic tidings of invisible things ! " Just 
what this hidden presence in nature was, which 
Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light 
of which he lived, tramping the hills for days 
together, the poet never could explain logically or 
in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader who 
may himself have had gleaming moments of a 
similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth 
simply proclaims the fact of them come with a 
heart-satisfying authority : — 

" Magnificent 
The morning rose, in memorable pomp, 
Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front 
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near 

*The Prelude, Book HI. 



wordswoeth's inner life 245 

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, 
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; 
And in the meadows and the lower grounds 
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,— 
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, 
And laborers going forth to till the fields." 

* Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim 
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked, 
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives. 19 * 

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange 
inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of 
nature round about him, his rural neighbors, 
tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, 
their crops and lambs and fences, must have 
thought him a very insignificant and foolish per- 
sonage. It surely never occurred to any one ot 
them to wonder what was going on inside of him 
or what it might be worth. And yet that inner 
life of his carried the burden of a significance that 
has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this 
day with inner joy. 

Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable auto* 

*The Prelude, Book IV, 



246 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

biographic document entitled The Story of my 
Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture 
with which in youth the sense of the life of nature 
filled him. On a certain hill-top he says : — 

" I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. 
Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to 
the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far 
beyond sight. ... With all the intensity of feel- 
ing which exalted me, all the intense communion 
I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars 
hidden by the light, with the ocean, — in no man- 
ner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be 
written, — with these I prayed as if they were the 
keys of an instrument. . . . The great sun, burn- 
ing with light, the strong earth,— dear earth, — 
the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, 
the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with 
a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this in- 
flatus, too, I prayed. . . . The prayer, this soul- 
emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was 
a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was 
wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, 
I was rapt and carried away. . . . Had any shep- 
herd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he 
would only have thought I was resting a few 
minutes. I made no outward show. Who could 



EICHAKD JEFFERIES QUOTED 24? 

have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was 
going on in me as I reclined there ! " * 

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured 
by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet 
in what other hind of value can the preciousness 
of any hour, made precious by any standard, 
consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited sig- 
nificance like these, engendered in some one, by 
what the hour contains ? 

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our 
own practical interests make us to all other things, 
that it seems almost as if it were necessary to be- 
come worthless as a practical being, if one is to 
hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the 
impersonal world of worths as such, to have any 
perception of life's meaning on a large objective 
scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your 
insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympa- 
thetic an occupation, an occupation which will 
change the usual standards of human value in the 
twinkling of an eye* giving to foolishness a place 
ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the 
distinctions which it takes a hard-working con- 
ventional man a lifetime to build up. You may 
be a prophet, at this rate ; but you cannot be a 
worldly success. 

* Op. cit. f Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, & 



248 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by 
many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes 
the usual human distinctions, brings all con- 
ventionalisms into solution, and loves and cele- 
brates hardly any human attributes save those 
elementary ones common to all members of the 
race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, 
a rider on omnibus -tops and ferry-boats, and, 
considered either practically or academically, a 
worthless, unproductive being. His verses are 
but ejaculations — things mostly without subject 
or verb, a succession of interjections on an im- 
mense scale. He felt the human crowd as raptur- 
ously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as 
an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to 
absorb 'one's mind in which should be business 
sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious 
man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what 
he feels : — 

Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face; 

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I seo 
you also face to face. 

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! 
how curious you are to me ! 

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, 
returning home, are more curious to me than you sup- 
pose; 



WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 249 

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, 

are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you 

might suppose. 
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from 

shore to shore? 
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide; 
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, 

and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; 
Others will see the islands large and small; 
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the 

sun half an hour high. 
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years 

hence, others will see them, 
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the 

falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 
It avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not. 
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I 

felt; 
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a 

crowd; 
Just as you are refresh' d by the gladness of the river and 

the bright flow, I was refresh' d; 
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the 

swift current, I stood, yet was hurried; 
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the 

thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked. 
I too many and many a time cross' d the river, the sun half 

an hour high; 
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls — I saw them high in 

the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, 



250 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, 
and left the rest in strong shadow, 

I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and tho gradual edging 
toward the south. 

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships 
at anchor, 

The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars; 

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, 
the frolicsome crests and glistening; 

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray 
walls of the granite store-houses by the docks; 

On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chim- 
neys burning high .... into the night, 

Casting their flicker of black .... into the clefts of streets. 

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are tc you,* 

And so on, through the rest of a divinely beau- 
tiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this 
hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of 
profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read 
the delicious volume of his letters to a young car- 
conductor who had become his friend: — 



**New Yoek, Oct. 9, 1868. 

"Dear Pete, — It is splendid here this forenoon 
-bright and cool. I was out early taking a short 

*' Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged). 



WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 251 

walk by the river only two squares from where I 
live. . . . Shall I tell you about [my life] just to 
fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my 
room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and 
go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call 
on someone down town or on business, or per- 
haps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride 
a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 
23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each 
way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, 
every hour is occupied with something.) You 
know it is a never ending amusement and study 
and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours 
on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in 
this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort 
of living, endless panorama — shops and splendid 
buildings and great windows : on the broad side- 
walks crowds of women richly dressed continually 
passing, altogether different, superior in style and 
looks from any to be seen anywhere else — in fact 
a perfect stream of people — men too dressed in 
high style, and plenty of foreigners — and then in 
the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, 
carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all 
sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile 
after mile, and the splendor of such a great street 



252 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings 
many of them of white marble, and the gayety 
and motion on every side: you will not wonder 
how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a 
great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing 
the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself 
for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just 
looks on and observes." * 

Truly a futile way of passing the time, some oi 
you may say, and not altogether creditable to a 
grown-up man. And yet ? from the deepest point 
of view, who knows the more of truth, and who 
knows the less, — Whitman on his omnibus-top, 
full of the inner joy with which the spectacle in- 
spires him, or you, full of the disdain which the 
futility of his occupation excites? 

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, 
leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired 
and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses 
the ferry or goes up Broadway, Ms fancy does 
not thus « soar away into the colors of the sunset ' 
as did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at 
all the indisputable fact that this world never did 
anywhere or at any time contain more of essential 
divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied 

* Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42. 



CABLYLE AND SCHOPENHAUER 25S 

in the fields of vision over which his eyes so care- 
lessly pass. There is life ; and there, a step away, 
is death. There is the only kind of beanty there 
ever was. There is the old human struggle and 
its fruits together. There is the text and the 
sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to 
the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and 
common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. 
" Hech ! it is a sad sight ! " says Carlyle, walking 
at night with some one who appeals to him to 
note the splendor of the stars. And that very 
repetition of the scene to new generations of men 
in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the 
common order, which so fills a Whitman with 
mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the 
emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of « awful inner 
emptiness ' from out of which he views it all, the 
chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What 
is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same 
recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the 
same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind 
of fibre of which such inanities consist is the 
material woven of all the excitements, joys, and 
meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this 
world. 

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whit 



254 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

man, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, 
is one way, and the most fundamental way, of 
confessing one's sense of its unfathomable signifi- 
cance and importance. But how can one attain 
to the feeling of the "vital significance of an expe- 
rience, if one have it not to begin with ? There 
is no receipt which one can follow. Being a 
secret and a mystery, it often comes in myste- 
riously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes 
from out of the very grave wherein we imagined 
that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cel- 
lini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made 
of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly 
finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle 
of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and 
wet and mould possess it. His leg is broken and 
his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. But 
his thoughts turn to God as they have never 
turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads 
during the one hour in the twenty-four in which 
a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. 
He has religious visions. He sings psalms to him- 
self, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the 
last day of July, of the festivities customary on 
the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All 
these past years I celebrated this holiday with the 



BENVENOTO CELLINI AND TOLSTOI 255 

vanities of the world: from this year hencefoi- 
ward I will do it with the divinity of God. And 
then I said to myself, * Oh, how much more happy 
I am for this present life of mine than for all those 
things remembered I ' " * 

But the great understander of these mysterious 
ebbs and flows is Tolstoi. They throb all through 
his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the hero. 
Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the 
Russian empire., During the French invasion he 
is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of 
the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every 
form of misery assail him, the result being a reve- 
lation to him of the real scale of life's values. 
" Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, 
because he was deprived of it, the happiness of 
eating when he was hungry, of drinking when 
he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, 
and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange 
some words. . . . Later in life he always recurred 
with joy to this month of captivity, and never 
failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful 
and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the 
moral calm which he had experienced at this 
epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his 

•Vita, lib, 2, chap. iv. 



256 TAI^KS TO STUDENTS 

imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstof s 
description] the mountains with their wooded 
slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when 
he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he 
saw the light drive away the vapors, and the 
sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cu- 
polas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the 
river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays,—- his 
heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion 
kept continually with him, and increased a hun- 
dred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew 
graver. ... He learnt that man is meant for 
happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in 
the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, 
and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of 
our need, but of our abundance. . . . When calm 
reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and 
little by little went out, the full moon had reached 
the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout 
lay clearly visible ; and, beyond the inundation of 
light which filled them, the view plunged into the 
limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon 
the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of 
stars. ' All that is mine,' he thought. « All that 
is in me, is me I And that is what they think they 
have taken prisoner! That is what they have 



EMERSON AND NATURE 257 

shut up in a cabin ! ' So he smiled, and turned in 
to sleep among Ms comrades.*' * 

The occasion and the experience, then, are 
nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the 
soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents ab- 
sorbed by what is given. " Crossing a bare com- 
mon," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twi- 
light, under a clouded sky, without having in my 
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, 
I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration, I am glad 
to the brink of fear." 

Life is always worth living, if one have such 
responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly 
educated classes (so called) have most of us got 
far, far away from Nature. We are trained to 
seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclu- 
sively, and to overlook the common. We are 
stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with 
verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of 
these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy 
connected with our simpler functions often dry up, 
and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's 
more elementary and general goods and joys. 

The remedy under such conditions is to descend 
to a more profound and primitive level. To be 

*La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275* 3X6. 



258 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the 
army would permanently show the good of life 
to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in 
the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided 
beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line ; 
and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even 
themselves out. The good of all the artificial 
schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of 
seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and 
doing with one's body, grows and grows. The 
savages and children of nature, to whom we deem 
ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive 
where we are often dead, along these lines; and, 
could they write as glibly as we do, they would 
read lis impressive lectures on our impatience for 
improvement and on our blindness to the funda- 
mental static goods of life. "Ah! my brother," 
said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt 
never know the happiness of both thinking of 
nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, 
is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we 
were before our birth, and thus we shall be after 
death. Thy people, . . . when they have finished 
reaping one field, they begin to plough another; 
and, if the day were not enough, I have seen 
them plough by moonlight. What is their life to 



THE NON-THINKINO LEVEL 259 

ours, — the life that is as naught to them ? Blind 
that they are, they lose it all I But we live in the 
present." * 

The intense interest that life can assume when 
brought down to the non-thinking level, the 
level of pure sensorial perception, has been beau- 
tifully described by a man who can write, — Mr. 
W. H. Hudson, in, his volume, "Idle Days in 
Patagonia." 

" I spent the greater part of one winter," says 
this admirable author, " at a point on the Rio 
Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea. 

..." It was my custom to go out every morn- 
ing on horseback with my gun, and, followed by 
one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no 
sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into 
the gray, universal thicket, than I would find 
myself as completely alone as if five hundred in- 
stead of only five miles separated me from the 
valley and river. So wild and solitary and re- 
mote seemed that gray waste, stretching away 
into infinitude* a waste untrodden by man, and 
where the wild animals are so few that they 
have made no discoverable path in the wilder- 
ness of thorns. . . . Not once nor twice nor 

* Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240. 



260 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

thrice, but day after day I returned to this soli- 
tude, going to it in the morning as if to attend 
a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and 
thirst and the westering sun compelled me. 
And yet I had no object in going, — no motive 
which could be put into words; for, although I 
carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, — the 
shooting was all left behind in the valley. . . . 
Sometimes I would pass a whole day without 
seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than 
a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that 
time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of 
cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, 
often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite 
numb. ... At a slow pace, which would have 
seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I 
would ride about for hours together at a stretch. 
On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its 
summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. 
On every side it stretched away in great undu- 
lations, wild and irregular. How gray it all 
was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the 
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim 
and the outline obscured by distance. Descend- 
ing from my outlook, I would take up my aim- 
less wanderings again, and visit other elevations 



THE PATAGONIAN WILDERNESS 261 

to gaze on the same landscape from another 
point; and so on for hours. And at noon I 
would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded 
poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these 
rambles I discovered a small grove composed of 
twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient 
distance apart, that had evidently been resorted 
to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This 
grove was on a hill differing in shape from other 
hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I 
made a point of finding and using it as a rest- 
ing-place every day at noon. T did not ask 
myself why I made choice of that one spot, 
sometimes going out of my way to sit there, 
instead of sitting down under any one of the mill- 
ions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. 
I thought nothing about it, but acted uncon- 
sciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, 
after having rested there once, each time I 
wished to rest again, the wish came associated 
with the image of that particular clump of trees, 
with polished stems and clean bed of sand be- 
neath; and in a short time I formed a habit of 
returning, animal like, to repose at that same 
spot. 

" It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would 



262 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and 
yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, dur- 
ing which I sat for an hour without moving, was 
strangely grateful. All day there would be no 
sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, 
while listening to the silence, it occurred to my 
mind to wonder what the effect would be if I 
were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a 
horrible suggestion, which almost made me shud- 
der. But during those solitary days it was a rare 
thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the 
state of mind I was in, thought had become im- 
possible. My state was one of suspense and watch- 
fulness ; yet I had no expectation of meeting an 
adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as 
I feel now while sitting in a room in London. 
The state seemed familiar rather than strange, 
and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; 
and I did not know that something had come be- 
tween me and my intellect until I returned to my 
former self, — to thinking, and the old insipid ex- 
istence [again]. 

" I had undoubtedly gone hack ; and that state 
of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with 
suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, re- 
presented the mental state of the pure savage. He 



FELICITY OF THE SENSORIAL LIFE 263 

thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide 
in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in per- 
fect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, 
mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and 
which in their turn sometimes prey on him." * 

For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson 
writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which 
nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is 
nothing to describe. They are meaningless and 
vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their 
inner secret, they tingle with an importance that 
unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the 
boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been 
touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial 
life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, 
but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The 
holidays of life are its most vitally significant 
portions, because they are, or at least should be, 
covered with just this kind of magically irrespon- 
sible spell. 

And now what is the result of all these consid- 
erations and quotations? It is negative in one 
sense, but positive in another. It absolutely for* 
bids us to be forward in pronouncing on the 

* Op. cit., pp. 210-222 (abridged). 



264 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

meaninglessness of forms of existence other than 
our own ; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, 
and indulge those whom we see harmlessly inter- 
ested and happy in their own ways, however unin- 
telligible these may be to us. Hands off : neither 
the whole of truth nor the whole of good is re- 
vealed to any single observer, although each ob- 
server gains a partial superiority of insight from 
the peculiar position in which he stands. Even 
prisons and sick-rooms have their special revela* 
tions. It is enough to ask of each of us that he 
should be faithful to his own opportunities and 
make the most of his own blessings, without pre 
suming to regulate the rest of the vast field* 



Ill 

WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT 

In my previous talk, * On a Certain Blindness,' 
I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot- 
through life is with values and meanings which 
we fail to realize because of our external and in- 
sensible point of view* The meanings are there 
for the others, but they are not there for us. 
There lies more than a mere interest of curious 
speculation in understanding this. It has the 
most tremendous practical importance. I wish 
that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. 
It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, relig- 
ious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at 
the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake 
that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first 
thing to learn in intercourse with others is non- 
interference with their own peculiar ways of being 
happy, provided those ways do not assume to 
interfere by violence with ours. No one has k> 



266 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

sight into all the ideals. No one should presume 
to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dog- 
matize about them in each other is the root of 
most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait 
in human character most likely to make the angels 
weep. 

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill 
charms and perfections to the enchantment of 
which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And 
which has the superior view of the absolute truth, 
he or we? Which has the more vital insight 
into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is 
he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or 
are we in defect, being victims of a pathologi- 
cal anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical impor- 
tance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are 
the profounder truths revealed ; surely poor Jill's 
palpitating little life-throbs are among the won- 
ders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic 
interest; and it is to our shame that the rest 
of us cannot feel like JacK. For Jack real- 
izes Jill concretely, and we do not. He strug- 
gles toward a union with her inner life, divining 
her feelings, anticipating her desires, understand- 
ing her limits as manfully as he can, and yet 
inadequately, too; for he is sdso afflicted with 



LOVE DISPELS. BLINDNESS 26? 

aome blindness* even here* Whilst we, dead 
clods that we are, do not even seek after these 
things, but are contented that that portion of 
eternal fact named Jill should be for us at 
If it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, 
knows that Jack's way of taking it — so im- 
portantly — is the true and serious way ; and she 
responds to the truth in him by taking him truly 
and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness 
never wrap its clouds about either of them 
again I Where would any of us be, were there 
no one willing to know us as we really are 
or ready to repay us for our insight by making 
recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to 
realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and 
important way 

If you say that this is absurd, and that we can 
not be in love with everyone at once, I merely 
point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain 
persons do exist with an enormous capacity for 
friendship and for taking delight in other people's 
lives ; and that such persons know more of truth 
than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of 
ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its inten- 
sity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave 
those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding 



268 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet 
contains nothing intrinsically absurd. 

We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of 
ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only 
transiently riven here and there by fitful revela- 
tions of the truth. It is vain to hope for this 
state of things to alter much. Our inner secrets 
must remain for the most part impenetrable by 
others, for beings as essentially practical as we are 
are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot 
gain much positive insight into one another, can- 
not we at least use our sense of our own blindness 
to make us more cautious in going over the dark 
places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous 
ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive 
reversals of the truth? 

For the remainder of this hour I invite you to 
seek with me some principle to make our toler- 
ance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous 
lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to 
ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism 
now. 

A few summers ago I spent a happy week at 
the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of 
Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that 
sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmos* 



CHAUTAUQUA 269 

phere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelli- 
gence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, pros- 
perity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a 
serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. 
Here you have a town of many thousands of in- 
habitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and 
drained, and equipped with means for satisfying 
all the necessary lower and most of the super- 
fluous higher wants of man. You have a first- 
class college in full blast. You have magnificent 
music — - a chorus of seven hundred voices, with 
possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in 
the world. You have every sort of athletic exer- 
cise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to 
the ball-field and the more artificial doings which 
the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens 
and model secondary schools. You have general 
religious services and special club-houses for the 
several sects. You have perpetually running soda- 
water fountains, and daily popular lectures by 
distinguished men. You have the best of com- 
pany, and yet no effort* You have no zymotic 
diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, 
no police. You have culture, you have kindness, 
you have cheapness, you have equality, you have 
the best fruits of what mankind has fought and 



270 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

bled and striven for under the name of eiviliza* 
tion for centuries. You have, in short, a fore- 
taste of what human society might be, were it 
all in the light, with no suffering and no dark 
corners. 

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a 
week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of 
everything, by the middle-class paradise, without 
a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a 
tear. 

And yet what was my own astonishment, on 
emerging into the dark and wicked world again, 
to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involunta- 
rily saying : " Ouf ! what a relief I Now for some- 
thing primordial and savage, even though it were 
as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the bal- 
ance straight again. This order is too tame, this 
culture too second-rate, this goodness too unin- 
spiring. This human drama without a villain or 
a pang ; this community so refined that ice-cream 
soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to 
the brute animal in man ; this city simmering in 
the tepid lakeside sun ; this atrocious harmlessness 
of all things,— 1 cannot abide with them. Let me 
take my chances again in the big outside worldly 
wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There 



CHAUTAUQUA 2T1 

are the heights and depths, the precipices and the 
steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the in- 
finite ; and there is more hope and help a thousand 
times than in this dead level and quintessence of 
every mediocrity." 

Such was the sudden right-about-face performed 
for me by my lawless fancy! There had been 
spread before me the realization — on a small, 
sample scale of course — of all the ideals for which 
our civilization has been striving: security, in- 
telligence, humanity, and order; and here was 
the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural 
man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such 
a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contra- 
diction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a pro- 
fessor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to 
unravel and explain, if I could. 

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself 
what the thing was that was so lacking in this 
Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one 
forever falling short of the higher sort of content- 
ment. And I soon recognized that it was the ele- 
ment that gives to the wicked outer world all its 
moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,— 
the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of 
strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. 



272 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, 
what the romances and the statues celebrate and 
the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the 
everlasting battle of the powers of light with 
those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its 
bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory 
from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable 
Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in 
sight anywhere, and no point of the compass 
visible from which danger might possibly appear. 
The ideal was so completely victorious already 
that no sign of any previous battle remained, 
the place just resting on its oars. But what our 
human emotions seem to require is the sight 
of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits 
are being merely eaten* things become ignoble. 
Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its 
uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through 
alive, and then turning its back on its success to 
pursue another more rare and arduous still — this is 
the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us ? 
and the reality of which it seems to be the func- 
tion of all the higher forms of literature and fine 
art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chau- 
tauqua there were no racks, even in the place's 
historical museum ; and no sweat, except possibly 



GROWING TAMENESS OF THE WORLD 278 

fche gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, 
or on the sides of some player in the ball-field. 

Such absence of human nature in extremis any- 
where seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for 
Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest. 

But was not this a paradox well calculated to 
fill one with dismay ? It looks indeed, thought I, 
as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism 
about our civilization were, after all, quite right. 
An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. 
Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and 
teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the 
old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. 
And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we 
must in future turn more and more away from the 
actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's 
or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful 
and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to 
one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, 
is nevertheless obeying more and more just those 
ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere 
Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale. 
Was im Gresang soil leben muss im Lehen untergehn. 
Even now, in our own country, correctness, fair- 
ness, and compromise for every small advantage 
are crowding out all other qualities. The higher 



274 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out 
of life.* 

With these thoughts in my mind, I was speed- 
ing with the train toward Buffalo, when, near 
that city, the sight of a workman doing some- 
thing on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron con- 
struction brought me to my senses very suddenly. 
And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that 
I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral 
blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a 
remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the 
spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never 
noticed the great fields of heroism lying round 
about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. 
I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, 
labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of 
romance. And yet there it was before me in the 
daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clang- 
ing fights and desperate marches only is heroism 
to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and 
fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On 
freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle- 
yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the fire- 

*This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine 
wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only 
episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere 
tending toward the Chautauquan ideals. 



THE HEBOIC ASPECT OF COMMOK I*ABOR 275 

men and the policemen, the demand for courage 
is incessant ; and the supply never fails. There, 
every day of the year somewhere, is human nat- 
ure in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, 
an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have 
it sweating and aching and with its powers of 
patient endurance racked to the utmost under 
the length of hours of the strain. 

As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life 
around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; 
and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I 
had ever before felt with the common life of 
common men began to fill my soul. It began to 
seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty 
skin were the only virtue genuine and vital 
enough to take account of. Every other virtue 
poses ; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, 
and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like 
this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these 
our sustainers, these the very parents of our 
life. 

Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had 
had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in 
looking at the peasant-women, in from the coun- 
try on their business at the market for the day. 
Old hags many of them were, dried and brown 



276 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, 
with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, 
stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, 
looking neither to the right nor the left, bent 
on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, re- 
mote; — and yet at bottom, when you came to 
think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splen- 
dors and corruptions of that city on their laborL 
ous backs. For where would any of it have been 
without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in 
the fields? And so with us: not to our gen* 
erals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and 
Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought 
the monuments of gratitude and reverence of 
a city like Boston to be reared 

If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi, yot 
will see that I passed into a vein of feeling simi 
lar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conven 
tionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive 
deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, 
and dumbness of the unconscious natural man. 

Where now is our Tolstoi, I said, to bring the 
truth of all this home to our American bosoms, 
fill us with a better insight, and wean us away 
from that spurious literary romanticism on which 



THE DIVINE IS THE COMMON 277 

our wretched culture — as it calls itself — is fed? 
Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide- 
bound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells 
or a Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are 
they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and 
not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning 
of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? 
Must we wait for some one born and bred and 
living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of 
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice? 

And there I rested on that day, with a sense of 
widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair 
to call an increase of religious insight into life. 
In God's eyes the differences of social position, 
of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, 
which different men exhibit, and all the other 
rarities and exceptions on which they so fantasti- 
cally pin their pride, must be so small as practi- 
cally quite to vanish ; and all that should remain 
is the common fact that here we are, a countless 
multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to 
peculiar difficulties, with which we must sev- 
erally struggle by using whatever of fortitude 
and goodness we can summon up. The exercise 
of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be 
the significant portion of the whole business? 



278 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

and the distinctions of position can only be a 
manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface 
upon which these underground virtues may mani- 
fest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human 
life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human 
attributes exist only in particular individuals, 
they must belong to the mere trapping and dec- 
oration of the surface-show. 

Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as 
levelled down, — ■ levelled up in their common inner 
meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness 
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this 
levelling insight tends to be obscured again ; and 
always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps 
us up, so that we end once more by thinking that 
creation can be for no other purpose than to 
develop remarkable situations and conventional 
distinctions and merits. And then always some 
new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet 
has to arise — the Buddha, the Christ, or some 
Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi — to 
redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little, there 
comes some stable gain; for the world does get 
more humane, and the religion of democracy 
tends toward permanent increase. 



TOLSTOl ON COMMON PEOPLE 279 

This, as I said, became for a time my convic* 
tion, and gave me great content. I have put the 
matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so 
that I might lead you into it more directly and 
completely, and so save time. But now I am 
going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more 
impersonal way. 

Tolstoi's levelling philosophy began long before 
he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in 
that wonderful document of his entitled « My Con- 
fession,' which led the way to his more specifically 
religious works. In his masterpiece 'War and 
Peace,' — assuredly the greatest of human novels,— 
the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little 
soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, 
and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and 
filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, 
which have been closed, to the mind of the prin- 
cipal character of the book ; and his example evi- 
dently is meant by Tolstoi to let God into the 
world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieif 
is taken prisoner by the French ; and, when too ex- 
hausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as 
other prisoners were in the famous retreat from 
Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his 
little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and 
uncomplainingly awaiting the end. 



280 ^ALKS TO STUDENTS 

"The more," writes Tolstoi" in the work «My 
Confession,' "the more I examined the life of 
these laboring folks, the more persuaded I be- 
came that they veritably have faith, and get 
from it alone the sense and the possibility of 
life. . . . Contrariwise to those of our own class, 
who protest against destiny and grow indignant 
at its rigor, these people receive maladies and 
misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, 
and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all 
had to be like that, could not be otherwise, 
and that it is all right so. . . . The more we live 
by our intellect, the less we understand the 
meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suf- 
fering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, 
and draw near to death with tranquillity, and of- 
tener than not with joy. . . . There are enormous 
multitudes of them happy with the most perfect 
happiness, although deprived of what for us is the 
sole good of life. Those who understand life's 
meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are 
to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hun- 
dreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, 
endure privations and pains, live and die, and 
throughout everything see the good without see- 
ing the vanity. I had to love these people. The 



STEVENSON ON COMMON PEOPLE 281 

more I entered into their life, the more I loved 
them; and the more it became possible for me 
to live, too. It came about not only that the 
life of our society, of the learned and of the 
rich, disgusted me — more than that, it lost all 
semblance of meaning in my eyes. All our ac- 
tions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, 
all appeared to me with a new significance. 
I understood that these things might be charm- 
ing pastimes, but that one need seek in them 
no depth, whereas the life of the hard-work- 
ing populace, of that multitude of human be- 
ings who really contribute to existence, ap- 
peared to me in its true light. I understood that 
there veritably is life, that the meaning which life 
there receives is the truth ; and I accepted it." * 

In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our 
piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind. 

"What a wonderful thing," he writes, f "is this 
Man! How surprising are his attributes! Poor 
soul, here for so little, cast among so many 
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely de- 
scended, irremediably condemned to prey upon 
his fellow-lives,— who should have blamed him, 

*My Confession, X. (condensed). 

t Across the Plains : " Pulvis et Umbra " (abridged). 



282 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

had he been of a piece with his destiny and a 
being merely barbarous? • . . [Yet] it matters not 
where we look, under what climate we observe 
him, in what stage of society, in what depth 
of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous mo- 
rality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hard- 
ship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a 
fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who 
sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, 
simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, 
constant to toil, brave to drown, for others ; • . « 
in the slums of cities, moving among indiffer- 
ent millions to mechanical employments, with- 
out hope of change in the future, with scarce a 
pleasure in the present, and yet true to his 
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his 
neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright 
gin-palace, • ■ „ often repaying the world's scorn 
with service, often standing firm upon a scruple ; 
* • . everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, 
everywhere some decency of thought and cour- 
age, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual 
goodness,— ah ! if I could show you this ! If I 
could show you these men and women all the 
world over, in every stage of history, under 
every abuse of error, under every circumstance 



TOLSTOf S ONE-SIDEDNESS 288 

of failure, without hope, without help, without 
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of 
virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the 
poor jewel of their souls." 

All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly 
do we need our Tolstois and Stevensons to keep 
our sense for it alive. Yet you remember the 
Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as 
good as another?" replied, "Yes; and a great 
deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me) 
does Tolstoi overcorrect our social prejudices, 
when he makes his love of the peasant so ex- 
clusive, and hardens his heart toward the edu- 
cated man as absolutely as he does. Grant that 
at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little 
sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep 
down in the souls of the participants we may be 
sure that something of the sort was hid, some 
inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting 
when required. And, after all, the question re- 
curs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain 
that the surroundings and circumstances of the 
virtue do make so little difference in the impor- 
tance of the result? Is the functional utility, the 
worth to the universe of a certain definite amount 
of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if 



284 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

the possessor of these virtues is in an educated 
situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if 
he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and 
drawing water, just to keep himself alive ? Tol- 
stoi's philosophy, deeply enlightening though it 
certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It sa- 
vors too much of that Oriental pessimism and 
nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenom- 
enal world and its facts and their distinctions to 
be a cunning fraud. 

A mere bare fraud is just what our Western 
common sense will never believe the phenomenal 
world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys 
and virtues are the essential part of life 9 s business, 
but it is sure that some positive part is also played 
by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic in 
romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it 
sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really 
just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and 
sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with 
us really under every disguise; at Chautauqua ; 
here in your college; in the stock-yards and on 
the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia's 
court. But, instinctively, we make a combination 
of two tilings in judging the total significance of 



WALTER WYCROFF QUOTED 285 

a human being. We feel it to be some sort of a 
product (if such a product only could be calcu- 
lated) of his inner virtue and his outer place,— 
neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the 
outer differences had no meaning for life, why in- 
deed should all this immense variety of them 
exist? They must be significant elements of the 
world as well. 

Just test Tolstof s deification of the mere man- 
ual laborer by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter 
Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in 
the demolition of some buildings at West Point, 
writes of the spiritual condition of the class of 

men to which he temporarily chose to belong: 

" The salient features of our condition are plain 
enough. We are grown men, and are without a 
trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell 
to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength 
for so many hours each day. We are thus in the 
lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular 
strength in the open market for what it will 
bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is 
all the capital that we have. We have no reserve 
means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand 
off for a < reserve price.' We sell under the ne- 
cessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly 



286 TAJIKS TO STUDENT® 

speaking, we must sell our labor or starve ; and* 
as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have 
no other way of meeting this need, we must sell 
at once for what the market offers for our labor. 

" Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, 
and he will certainly get from us as much work as 
he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for 
this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his 
business. He has sole command of us. He never 
saw us before, and he will discharge us all when 
the ddbris is cleared away. In the mean time he 
must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical 
labor which we, individually and collectively, are 
capable of. If he should drive some of us to ex- 
haustion, and we should not be able to continue at 
work, he would not be the loser % for the market 
would soon supply him with others to take our 
places. 

" We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly 
see, — that we have sold our labor where we could 
sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it 
where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid 
high, and he must get all the labor that he can ; 
and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we 
shall part with as little as we can. From work 
like ours there seems to us to have been elimi« 



WALTEB WYCKOFF QUOTED 28T 

aated every element which constitutes the nobility 
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its prog- 
ress, and no community of interest with our em- 
ployer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, 
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull 
monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the 
signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end. 

"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor- 
market, and having no certainty of permanent em- 
ployment, and no organization among ourselves, 
we must expect to work under the watchful eye 
of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves 
that we are, through our tasks. 

"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives 
are hard, barren, hopeless lives." 

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, 
are not lives in which one ought to be willing 
permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is 
it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew 
a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition ; and we 
think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the 
insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly 
more insensible, and we extol them to the skies- 
Is it the poverty ? Poverty has been reckoned the 
crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it 
the slavery to a task ? the loss of finer pleasures? 



288 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of 
the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its 
credit, — read the records of missionary devotion 
all over the world. It is not any one of these 
things, then, taken by itself, — no, nor all of them 
together,— that make such a life undesirable. A 
man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, 
and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the 
noblest of God's creatures. Quite possibly there 
were some such persons in the gang that our author 
describes ; but the current of their souls ran under- 
ground ; and he was too steeped in the ancestral 
blindness to discern it. 

If there were any such morally exceptional indi- 
viduals, however, what made them different from 
the rest? It can only have been this, — that their 
souls worked and endured in obedience to some 
inner ideal, while their comrades were not actu- 
ated by anything worthy of that name. These 
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that 
we can almost never penetrate, although some- 
thing about the man may often tell us when they 
are there. In Mr. WyckofFs own case we know 
exactly what the self-imposed ideal was. Partly 
he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry 
through a strenuous achievement j but mainly he 



PHILLIPS BROOKS ON POVERTY 289 

wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fel- 
low-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a 
certain heroic significance, and make us accord to 
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine 
his fellows with various other ideals. To say noth- 
ing of wives and babies, one may have been a con« 
vert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale 
singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart 
all the while he labored. Or there might have 
been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compa- 
triot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embrac- 
ing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty 
was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who 
knows how much of that higher manliness of pov- 
erty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so pene* 
tratingly, was or was not present in that gang? 

" A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, 
" is poverty to live in, — a land where I am thank- 
ful very often if I can get a berry or a root to eat. 
But living in it really, letting it bear witness to 
me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by 
judging it after the standard of the other lands, 
gradually there come out its qualities. Behold I 
no land like this barren and naked land of pov- 
erty could show the moral geology of the world. 
See how the hard ribs « . . stand out strong and 



290 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

solid. No life like poverty could so get one to 
the heart of things and make men know their 
meaning, could so let us feel life and the world 
with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown 
away. . . . Poverty makes men come very near 
each other, and recognize each other's human 
hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, de- 
mands and cries out for faith in God. ... I know 
how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere 
mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. . . . 
But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and 
freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon 
his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true 
region and kind of life, with its own chances of 
character, its own springs of happiness and reve- 
lations of God. Let him resist the characterless- 
ness which often goes with being poor. Let him 
insist on respecting the condition where he lives. 
Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he 
grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the 
old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, 
and with a true honor for the narrow home in 
which he has lived so long." * 

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more 
usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is 

* Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167. 



THE NEED OF AN IDEAL 291 

moved by no such ideal inner springs. The back- 
ache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently 
endured- — for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, 
a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, 
and to begin again the next day and shirk as much 
as one can. This really is why we raise no monu- 
ment to the laborers in the Subway, even though 
they be our conscripts, and even though after a 
fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient 
hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And 
this is why we do raise monuments to our sol- 
diers, whose outward conditions were even bru- 
taller still. The soldiers are supposed to have 
followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed 
to have followed none. 

You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; 
and how strangely the complexities of this wonder- 
ful human nature of ours begin to develop under 
our hands. We have seen the blindness and dead- 
ness to each other which are our natural inheri- 
tance; and, in spite of them, we have been led 
to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth 
show, and which may be present in the lives of 
others where we least descry it. And now we 
are led to say that such inner meaning can be 
complete and valid for us also, only when the 



292 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with 
an ideaL 

But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? 
Can we give no definite account of such a word? 

To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for 
instance, must be something intellectually con- 
ceived, something of which we are not uncon- 
scious, if we have it ; and it must carry with it 
that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that 
go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there 
must be novelty in an ideal, — novelty at least for 
him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is 
incompatible with ideality, although what is sod- 
den routine for one person may be ideal novelty 
for another. This shows that there is nothing 
absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives 
that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter 
is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet 
for many of our brethren it is the most legiti- 
mately engrossing of ideals. 

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immedi- 
ately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest 
things in life. Everybody has them in some shape 
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, 
low or high ; and the most worthless sentimental 



MERE IDEALS ARE INSUFFICIENT 298 

Ists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse- 
makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, 
or endurance, possibly have them on the most co- 
pious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our 
horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying 
our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. And 
your college professor, with a starched shirt and 
spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all 
alone by itself enough to render a life significant, 
be the most absolutely and deeply significant of 
men. Tolstoi would be completely blind in de- 
spising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody ; and 
all our new insight into the divinity of muscular 
labor would be altogether off the track of truth. 

But such consequences as this, you instinctively 
feel, are erroneous. The more ideals a man has, 
the more contemptible, on the whole, do you con- 
tinue to deem him, if the matter ends there for 
him, and if none of the laboring man's virtues 
are called into action on his part,— no courage 
shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars 
contracted in the attempt to get them realized. 
It is quite obvious that something more than 
the mere possession of ideals is required to 
make a life significant in any sense that claims 
the spectator's admiration* Inner joy, to be 



294 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is 
its own private sentimental matter. To extort 
from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals 
to look after, the tribute of our grudging recog- 
nition, it must back its ideal visions with what 
the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly- 
virtue; it must multiply their sentimental sur- 
face by the dimension of the active will, if we 
are to have depth, if we are to have anything 
cubical and solid in the way of character. 

The significance of a human life for communi- 
cable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus 
the offspring of a marriage of two different par- 
ents, either of whom alone is barren. The 
ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the 
virtues by themselves no novelty. And let the 
orientalists and pessimists say what they will, 
the thing of deepest — or, at any rate, of com- 
paratively deepest — significance in life does seem 
to be its character of progress, or that strange 
union of reality with ideal novelty which it con- 
tinues from one moment to another to present. 
To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what 
we call intelligence. Not every one's intelligence 
can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the 
ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the 



THE COMPLETELY SIGNIFICANT LIFE 295 

older more familiar good. In this case character, 
though not significant totally, may be still signifi- 
cant pathetically. So, if we are to choose which 
is the more essential factor of human character, 
the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we 
must side with Tolstoi', and choose that simple 
faithfulness to his light or darkness which any 
common unintellectual man can show. 

But, with all this beating and tacking on my 
part, I fear you take me to be reaching a con- 
fused result. I seem to be just taking things up 
and dropping them again. First I took up Chau- 
tauqua, and dropped that; then Tolstoi and the 
heroism of common toil, and dropped them ; 
finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost 
dropping those. But please observe in what 
sense it is that I drop them. It is when they 
pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance. 
Culture and refinement all alone are not enough 
to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when 
uncombined with pluck and will. But neither 
are pluck and will, dogged endurance and in- 
sensibility to danger enough, when taken all 
alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some 
chemical combination among these principles, for 



296 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

a life objectively and thoroughly significant to 
result. 

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclu- 
sion. But in a question of significance, of worth, 
like this, conclusions can never be precise. The 
answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always 
a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, 
insight, and good will. But it is an answer, all 
the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course 
of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have 
been opened to many important things. Some of 
you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you 
were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie 
around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you 
ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, 
although the amount is, truly enough, a matter 
of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of 
the combination of ideals with active virtues you 
have a rough standard for shaping your decision. 
In any case, your imagination is extended. You 
divine in the world about you matter for a little 
more humility on your own part, and tolerance, 
reverence, and love for others; and you gain 
a certain inner joyfulness at the increased impor- 
tance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a 
religious inspiration and an element of spiritual 



THE LABOR-QUESTION 29't 

health, and worth more than large amounts of that 
sort of technical and accurate information which 
we professors are supposed to be able to impart. 

To show the sort of thing I mean by these 
words, I will just make one brief practical illus- 
tration, and then close. 

We are suffering to-day in America from what 
is called the labor-question ; and, when you go out 
into the world, you will each and all of you be 
caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term 
labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic dis- 
contents and socialistic projects, and the conserva- 
tive resistances which they provoke. So far as 
this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable, — and I 
think it is so only to a limited extent, — the un- 
healthiness consists solely in the fact that one-half 
of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind 
to the internal significance of the lives of the other 
half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to 
feel the moral virtue, and they do not guess the 
presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at 
cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each 
other as they might regard a set of dangerously 
gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at 
the inner motivation, making the most horrible 



298 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think 
of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for 
safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless af- 
fectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a 
pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greedi- 
ness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all 
that many rich men can see in the state of mind 
of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man 
begins to do the sentimental act over the poor 
man, what senseless blunders does he make, pity- 
ing him for just those very duties and those 
very immunities which, rightly taken, are the 
condition of his most abiding and characteristic 
joys ! Each, in short, ignores the fact that happi- 
ness and unhappiness and significance are a vital 
mystery ; each pins them absolutely on some ridic- 
ulous feature of the external situation ; and every- 
body remains outside of everybody else's sight. 

Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to 
pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, 
and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly 
got to change: such changes have always hap- 
pened, and will happen to the end of time. But 
if, after all that I have said, any of you expect 
that they will make any genuine vital difference 
on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, 



FITZ-JAMES STEPHEN QUOTED 299 

you will have missed the significance of my entire 
lecture. The solid meaning of life is always the 
same eternal thing, — the marriage, namely, of 
some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some 
fidelity, courage, and endurance ; with some man's 
or woman's pains.--- And, whatever or wherever 
life may be, there will always be the chance for 
that marriage to take place. 

Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago 
words to this effect more eloquent than any I 
can speak : " The * Great Eastern,' or some of her 
successors," he said, " will perhaps defy the roll of 
the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing 
their passengers to feel that they have left the 
firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the 
grave may come to be performed with similar 
facility. Progress and science may perhaps en- 
able untold millions to live and die without a 
care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They 
will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant 
conversation. They will wonder that men ever 
believed at all in clanging fights and blazing 
towns and sinking ships and praying hands ; and, 
when they come to the end of their course, they 
will go their way, and the place thereof will know 
them no more. But it seems unlikely that they 



800 TALKS TO STUDENTS 

will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on 
which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its 
currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty 
winds, as those who battled with it for years to- 
gether in the little craft, which, if they had few 
other merits, brought those who navigated them 
full into the presence of time and eternity, their 
maker and themselves, and forced them to have 
some definite view of their relations to them and 
to each other." * 

In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call 
it, those philosophers are right who contend that 
the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no 
real history. The changing conditions of history 
touch only the surface of the show. The altered 
equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our 
opportunities and open chances to us for new 
ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into 
life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal 
will vanish ; and he would needs be a presumptu- 
ous calculator who should with confidence say that 
the total sum of significances is positively and ab- 
solutely greater at any one epoch than at any other 
of the world. 

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to 

♦Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318. 



CONCLUSION 801 

consider certain qualifications in which I myself 
believe. But one can only make one point in one 
lecture, and I shall be well content if I have 
brought my point home to you this evening in 
even a slight degree. There are compensations: 
and no outward changes of condition in life can 
keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from 
singing in all sorts of different men's hearts. 
That is the main fact to remember. If we could 
not only admit it with our lips, but really and 
truly believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, 
how our antipathies and dreads of each other, 
would soften down! If the poor and the rich 
could look at each other in this way, sub specie 
ceternatis, how gentle would grow their disputes ! 
what tolerance and good humor, what willingness 
to live and let live, would come into the world! 



THE END* 



By Professor William James 

THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 

2 vols. 8vo. 1 193 pp. H. Holt & Co. 1900. 
Price $5.00 net. 

A TEXT- BOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY 

i2mo. 478 pp. H. Holt & Co. Price $1.60 net. 
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

James Sully, in Mind. — " Professor James is, before everything 
else, original,^energetically, aggressively original. . . . Our author has 
the magical power, given to the very few, of re-creating his subject. . . . 
His work will live — if only through the charm of its literary expression 
— when most text-books lie dusty and forgotten." 

Victor BrOChard, in the article "James (William)" of the Grande 
Encyclopedic, -vol. xx. — "This book of Mr. James's is certainly one of 
the most important works of the time. Admirably informed on all the 
work accomplished in physiological and psychological research in France, 
Germany, England, and Italy, Mr. James has produced a very exact and 
complete picture of the science up to the moment of writing. . . . For 
vigor of thought and clearness of exposition this work is at present un- 
equalled, and it assures to the American thinker an eminent place 
among the philosophers of the nineteenth century." 

Leon Marillier, in the Revue Philosopbique. — " In spite of the objec- 
tions which would necessarily be raised to the theories it contains, it is 
nevertheless a glorious work, and one which for the future will have a 
conspicuous place in the library of all psychologists between the works of 
Taine and Stuart Mill." 

The Speaker. — " Those who retain any taste in that direction — 
namely, of philosophy — will find Mr. James's book one of the brightest 
and freshest that recent years have produced. In it metaphysics have again 
condescended to speak the language of polite letters, and learning has been 
wise enough to take wit for her companion." 

Max DessOir, in the article on the " History of Psychology " in Rein's 
Encyclopaediscben Handbuch der Paedagogik, 1896. — "A strong inclina- 
(303>_ 



tion toward the study of abnormal phenomena is also shown by that inves- 
tigator whom we may single out from the imposing array of American 
psychologists, Baldwin, Ladd, Jastrow, and others. I mean James 
[18903. James's is not a systematic mind. His accounts of things suffer 
from subjectivity and figurativeness j yet, by the power of his separate 
thoughts and the manner in which he sweeps one forward, he begins to 
influence European science." 

Professor J. McK. Cattell, in bis wee-presidential address before 
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1898. — " But 
the land lay fallow, and twenty years ago the seed was sown. James at 
Harvard began the publication of a series of striking articles, culminating 
in the issue in 1890 of the ' Principles of Psychology,' a work of genius 
such as is rare in any language and in any country." 

THE WILL TO BELIEVE, and Other 

Essays in Popular Philosophy. Sm. 8vo. pp. xiv. 
352. Longmans, Green & Co. 1897. Price $2.00. 

CONTENTS.— The Will to Believe.— Is Life worth 
Living? — The Sentiment of Rationality. — Reflex 
Action ArTD Theism. — The Dilemma of Determinism. — 
The Mor/.l Philosopher and the Moral Life. — Great 
Men and their Environment. — The Importance of Indi- 
viduals. — On Some Hegelisms.-— What Psychical Re- 
search HAS ACCOMPLISHED. 

F. C. S. Schiller^ in Mind, writes ; "At the risk of seeming to 
use the language of extravagant eulogy I should like to call this collection 
of Professor James's essays a wholly admirable book, alike in form and in 
matter. That the form of any of Professor James's literary productions 
should be deserving of the highest praise was, indeed, no more than would 
be anticipated. . . . But it is the matter even more than the manner of 
Professor James's teachings that renders his volume a delight to all lovers of 
philosophic literature. That a volume of essays on various topics, ranging 
in date from 1879-96, should possess a substantial unity surpassing that of 
many formal treatises, is, indeed, a marvel, explained only by the fact in this 
case that they are welded together by the unity of a strong and picturesque 
personality. . . . Professor James's essays are popular in this highest sense, 
that they can arouse the enthusiasm of the many without ceasing to stimu- 
late the few." 

(J04) 



